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Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "According to its own speed tests, Microsoft's Internet Explorer loads most websites faster than both Chrome and Firefox when looking at the top 25 websites on the Internet. 'As you can see, IE8 outperforms Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0 in loading 12 websites, Chrome 1.0 places second by loading nine sites first, and Firefox brings up the rear by loading four sites faster than the other two browsers. Also, in case you missed it, IE loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox, and Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE, just for kicks.'"
This doesn't mean a thing because while IE7 is fast; I use it at work everyday, it also breaks many web standards and does things in non standard ways. Speed isn't the issue here.
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I prefer Firefox, but even I know Opera is amazingly quick.
Regardless, since when is the speed of loading a website the measure of a good browser?
Also, it's worth pointing out that this test shows IE is faster at loading cached pages, not uncached websites. From their paper:
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
It would be interesting to know what exactly those sites send to the browsers (many sites check your user agent and serve up different files depending on your browser, mainly because of ie behaving differently to every other browser out there)...
It would also make more sense to load local caches of the sites, or network conditions could affect things (especially things like dns caching etc)...
IE is massively behind other browsers when it comes to things like CSS, so i would imagine it has a lot less processing to do (Seeing as it ignores big parts of the spec), lynx also ignores big parts of the html/css specs and it subsequently loads sites very quickly.
Also, comparing IE8 (in beta) Chrome (in beta) against firefox 3.05 (production and fairly old) seems a rather unfair and pointless test... And where were Opera and Safari in these tests?
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Rumor has it that this whole agrument is a moot point anyway.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I can't agree. The startup time of IE on my work Windows PC is atrocious. Firefox beats it every time. And I use IE extensively every day.
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My experience with Firefox somehow differs a bit from yours. I used to see Firefox spend a lot of time in DNS queries for *everything*. Even if it's a host I just visited about a minute before. As a result I set up dnsmasq running on my computer and modified /etc/hosts so that every query goes through the local DNS cache. It's been working pretty well since. The wait time is dramatically reduced.
Of course Firefox is not all to blame for the slow DNS but it shouldn't be making queries *that* often either, IMHO.
I guess it's possible to modify some key/value pair in about:config to tell Firefox how long it should keep the entries in its hostname cache. But I'm too lazy to search for that ;)
Firefox loads a page up pretty fast after the DNS query is made, though. I don't think the speed is astonishingly fast but it's enough for me.
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Well, I'd have to access what version of IE you're using on what version of Windows and what's the rest of your config look like. Because in my experience, with no plugins or other addons installed on either browser and starting from a clean start, with the default configs for each browser, IE6 starts faster on Windows XP. IE8 seems atrociously slow to start on XP, although I've not measured its performance on a tuned Vista configuration.
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...IE loads some sites quicker?
Because it does not even understand half of the features of the site (some CSS stuff, much DOM stuff), and just ignores them. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I doubt it. Many people (including myself) run the same config and \. loads almost instantly for me every time.
But the reality is that, until they can be driven to under 50% of the browser market share, they pretty much get to set the standard.
They, Microsoft, get to set the lowest common denominator, the truth is though that most designers will be using progressive enhancement meaning that Saf, FF, Op, Konq are getting a nicer overall look with slicker running features whilst MSIE is getting either a "degraded" view or a separately developed page (I'm considering MS targetted CSS to be separately developed).
Basically, as a web designer since 1996-ish (and commercially for the last 5 years or so) I consider that MSIE has been holding things back all along. Less so now, but they're still not leading the way.
As for CSS3. If MS had included some basics, like rounded corners and columns, then we could have started making some headway with a less hacked together internet. Moz and Webkit have these things already waiting for the spec to be finished.
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html
IE8 is still in beta, like FF3.5 and Chrome 2.0. By comparing the latest build of IE vs. old builds of Chrome and FF they're comparing apples* and pears.
*No jokes about Safari.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
/nothing/ has full CSS3 support.
even those browsers that do have corner-radius support don't do it the way the W3C described (with separate x and y radii).
After reading the original report I tried to reproduce a simple test for the adobe home page. I used Firefox 3.0.7 and pre-loaded the adobe home page (as suggested in the report), I closed the tab and opened a new one and reloaded the adobe home page. It loaded in 2 or 3 seconds instead of the 9 seconds in the report. I am not sure what to make of this report if a simple experiment to reproduce the measurements fails on the first try. I ran the test on Windows XP Professional SP3.
That's because it uses plugins, rather than ActiveX Controls, and Microsoft.com is full of System checking ActiveX Controls
IE7 does a bad job at CSS1, and has just a few things from CSS2.
IE8 has bugs all around it's CSS1 and CSS2 implementation.
Others have bugs too, but at least they try to implement it and get decent acid test results(someone even scores 100/100 in latest beta builds)
Standards implementation in microsoft has never been a priority for any of their products(even their own standards, see OOXML for example...Not a single implementation of the approved standard.)
But you *DO* have to restart your browser after flushing the OS cache. Firefox and IE both cache DNS results. Try it.
Losing clients is hardly just a "lame excuse." I've seen it actually happen. I have, in fact, taken over website projects in the past for clients whose previous developer got canned after delivering a bland site that didn't look particularly professional in IE (because the developer focused so much on making the site's CSS bulletproof). These sites passed W3C validation with flying colors, but they looked like weak tea and cost the developer a client.
But you are right about the possibility of a major company coming along and changing things. If the W3C were to introduce some revolutionary new feature, and every browser but IE were to adopt it. And then some major player (like Google) were to come along and really embrace that feature, leaving IE users out in the cold, of course it would motivate MS to become more standards compliant. But that's not usually the way it works. W3C standards improvements are generally incremental and small (evolutionary, not revolutionary). So this seems an unlikely scenario.
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Instead, if IE developers really wants my attention, they'll surpass Mozilla and Safari in proper CSS rendering. How fast browsers render pages is secondary to that standards support, especially when no one browser clearly and consistently blows away the competition in speed (as shown in this 25 browser test).
When 25% of your traffic uses it, you can't ignore it. All you can do is spitefully send out an "X-IE6-Detected: You suck, upgrade you bum" header and an extra stylesheet to feed them your alpha-blended PNG's as shitty GIF's. Well, that and pull your hair out trying to get some JavaScript stuff working.
What really irks me is when I see *NBC news shows using screenshots where the browser is IE6. Hey Microsoft IE Team, go bug your subsidiary's and get them to upgrade! Some hot shot CEO from $BANK is probably watching and will make their IT staff "upgrade" from IE7 to IE6--after all, CNBC is using it so it can't be bad, right? Then $BANK=>$FED.Bailout($BANK.FileBankruptcy());
On that note, has anybody seen a webpage screen shot on TV were the browser was not IE? And does it make one an official nerd when you date TV shows by the style of monitor they use and the OS they are running?
my old laptop had 1 gig of ram and firefox was a serious memory issue. my new laptop has 3 gig and it doesnt matter any more. now i never have to restart it and run whatever extensions i want to.
some people need to upgrade their tech.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-272792.html
Crud, ignore this... I entered a wrong number in my spreadsheet. IE narrowly beats Chrome, 3.5320 to 3.5328, though that is within the margin of error for such a test.
No IE has handled CSS1 fine since IE4. Microsoft pioneered the standard back when they were the underdog. They just never accepted the Mozilla-based correction to it (border-box vs content-box, root vs body). And by the time of CSS2 they had 90% marketshare and had no interest in standards anymore.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html
"Unfortunately, not every browser supports all of CSS1, and only those browsers which fully and completely support CSS1 will get this right. Despite some claims to the contrary, IE6/Win's rendering of this page is not correct, as it (as well as some other browsers) doesn't correctly support background-attachment: fixed for any element other than the body."