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Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-we-all-have-to-design-for-the-broken-thing dept.

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.'"

6 of 532 comments (clear)

  1. Speed not equal to good by christurkel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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  2. No Opera? by krou · · Score: 5, Informative

    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:

    In the Internet Explorer lab: We visit each site prior to starting any site test. âoePreloadingâ the cache prior to a test helps ensure systems are at a known base before starting.

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    1. Re:No Opera? by sobachatina · · Score: 4, Informative

      That is actually a good idea.

      By loading cached pages they test the speed of the renderer and not the speed of the server or internet connection.

  3. More details.. by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  4. Re:Oh well by jabithew · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  5. Cannot reproduce results by rhdv · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.