Slashdot Mirror
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.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
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?