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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.'"
Ofcourse IE loads mozilla.com faster, that's the only site you'd ever need to open with IE...
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I don't care if page loads faster if it doesn' show correctly. I bet lynx can load it faster than IE, but that doesn't make it the best browser.
IE8 doesn't even have full CSS3 support. No corner-radius? What the heck is MS thinking?
A more useful test would perhaps be testing firefox 3.5 vs ie8 and chrome 2.0? Firefox 3 is already getting "old".
How is this "good" they test 25 sites (who only views 25 sites?) and IE is faster 12/25. This doesn't seem very compelling at all. They don't even have a simple majority on their side.
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...Microsoft tests its own release candidate software on its release candidate operating system and finds it faster than existing tried-and-tested software.
Very fair.
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/
...it's faster than the soon-to-be-old version of Firefox, and the soon-to-be-old version of Chrome. Way to stay ahead of the pack, there.
Though, to be honest, that's actually not to bad for IE.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Sure it loads up sites faster, that's because microsoft left out all the code that renders the web pages properly . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
"Loads most malware faster?" See, corrected it. It is IE after all ;)
Requiem
Upcoming version of browser outperforms current version of competitors is not remarkable. A most relevant comparison would include Firefox 3.1 (already in Beta) and Safari 4 (also in Beta).
I use IE 8. And it really is much better and right on par with Firefox ... EXCEPT I can't do online banking with Wachovia, and SLASHDOT corrcetly. I have to open a new tab to reply, or read a hidden comment.
And to comment I have to use Firefox. Which is what I am using now.
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that..Microsoft can no longer ignore Firefox, and has to come up with some such FUD. A healthy sign about status of Firefox.
hilarious
My [unreleased Microsoft software] runs [x] faster than your [available and fully released software].
What B$ from M$.
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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I believe it when I smell it for myself.
Oh. wrong story.
IE always has been faster. And I'm a firefox fanboy. Even with the bulk of add-ons stripped out, FF is still sluggish. IE is practically part of the OS, and that's a competitive advantage that FF can't beat. It just beats IE in every category other than speed.
No. On Windows, IE starts faster than Firefox, much the same way Safari starts faster on Mac OS X (big surprise). However, even on Windows, the latest versions of Firefox beat IE in rendering and Javascript performance benchmarks.
Sounds like Microsoft has been taking lessons from the NVidia and ATI/AMD School of Benchmarking. Lesson one at that school: pick some subset of data and "optimize" your benchmarks until they make your product look faster.
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And what about Javascript ?
Frankly, GMail is super slow on IE7, not because of page loading, but because any Javascript in IE is super slow.
In TFA, there is no site with Javascript !
It's true that IE8 loads pages blindingly fast.
What MS is missing, however, is that not all pages are supposed to be all blue background + some white text at the top.
are the benchmarks done on OS X, linux & Windows?
I didn't RTFA, but it would be fair to run all applications on different platforms and see if it makes a difference. I bet they didn't do that.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
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.
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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This is a stupid thing for Microsoft to do, because:
(a) if an independent source verifies the test, then nothing will be reported (because there is nothing to report)
(b) if an independent source refutes the test, then Microsoft are liars.
(c) if no independent source tests the test, then no one will believe Microsoft, except those that want justify their existing use of IE.
The smart thing to do would have been to get a completely independent and respected source to run the original test - or to destroy the reputations of IE6 and IE7 by comparing them with a vastly improved IE8 (which would have been trusted results from Microsoft).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Why are you so stubborn?
It's not difficult to believe that according to the company that makes a product, such product is the best around...
Since IE is the "Default" browser it is the most exploited, as such it costs any organization the most money to secure. (if you have 10K workstations and new IE bugs pop up all the time, your patch cycle becomes hell even if it's automated). If you want to save your company tons of money; switch to Fire Fox with NoScript and AdBlock+ Opera is still wikked fast; and chrome is pretty neat but I "Like" firefox because of the module, Stumble Upon alleviate soo much bordem that it's worth it's weight in gold.
The load time of IE6 is irrelevant. It's a nearly 8-year old browser, service packs notwithstanding. Lynx starts up faster than just about anything, but you don't see people bringing it up, because it doesn't belong in this discussion.
Good point, and Firefox can't touch IE in terms of damage caused by becoming infected with a trojan.
Hmm, so GM, Ford and Chrysler set the standard for cars in North America?
Preponderance alone does not set the standard. If it did, what exactly would that standard be today?
MS IE 5 or 6?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
Wait, wait, who cares about startup times. You mean, like, you actually close your browser?
Now, don't tell me you also reboot your system.
Let's be fair here. For the longest time, the argument of Linux booting slowly has been rebuked with a tongue-in-cheek "I see where you come from, but real systems needn't be rebooted every other hour to remain stable". For me it's the same with browsers, I close them once every couple days.
Yet, sadly, I have to agree that FF has a problem here. It becomes really, really sluggish (and a mem hog) after a few days...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I *have* noticed that IE7 handles one very specific thing MUCH faster than Firefox - copying large amounts of tabular data. If I load up a table with ~5 columns and ~2000 rows, it takes FF3 much longer just to highlight all of those rows, and attempting to copy that data to the clipboard usually kills the browser entirely. IE7 just plains handles it, usually in a matter of seconds. Not a common use case at all, and don't ask me why I'm even trying to do this, but as an FF fan I'd prefer it do EVERYTHING better than IE, and here's one instance where it doesn't.
IE sluggishness is so bad, that even though we aren't allowed to have any other browser on our computers, I use Firefox. That's right, IE is so bad, I risk disciplinary action to avoid having to use IE. The best part about the "You will use IE7 or higher only" mantra of our idiot IT department is that our time card website doesn't work with anything beyond IE6, so we all have to run a stupid little script that fools IE7 into thinking it is IE6.
Companies have always made comparisons between their products and competitors' products. Sometimes they even skew the comparison so their product is shown as better. MS is no different. First they use their unreleased future product IE8 against their competitors' current products. Second they use a somewhat meaningless metric: Speed to load. The main complaints about IE in general is that is unwieldy, doesn't follow standards, and it is slow. Ironically this test only proves that. I'm not an expert in web browser engines but it seems to me that an engine performs faster when it does not have to render. Coming across a webpage with things it can't render, it will perform faster as it ignores those elements. Mozilla.com is probably a lot more web standards compliant than Microsoft.com. So IE will load mozilla.com faster as it will ignore many things. The reverse is true for Firefox on microsoft.com as it will ignore all the nonstandard elements. In the end the comparison is rather meaningless until they change the conditions.
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I hate it when people say this. You obviously are leaving out a huge part of any research: discussion of the findings. You don't prove or disprove anything with the numbers. You use the numbers from your research COMBINED with existing literature and then hold a discussion of the findings. Numbers on their own mean nothing, but in proper research you give those number relevance by applying the appropriate context in which to understand what the numbers mean. What you MEAN to say is that PEOPLE can make the numbers say anything they want, because the numbers themselves don't prove anything.
The browser wars are almost at that point already, you know,
like when it became irrelevant just how fast your CPU was?
Most of the browsers are "good enough" for the average Joe, so
bragging about the loading times for a particular set of web
sites is falling upon deaf ears.
IE has always been a bug laiden, mish-mashed piece of software
and it became popular only because it came as part of the
windows operating system.
A lot of people use it at least once, to download a copy of their
favourite browser, which then replaces use of IE on windows.
The smarter people don't use windows at all.
This competition is futile and well past its usefullness.
Notice that the number one website, Google.com, requires only about 0.2-0.3 of a second to load, which is significantly faster than most of the rest of the sites on the list. Seems reasonable that has something to do with it being number one.
Live.com, on the other hand, takes about 3.4 seconds to load. According to those numbers, I could pull up Google.com, enter a query, and get results before I could even load Live.com's home page.
Yes, but what they forgot to say is that IE is faster than Chrome and Firefox, combined!
they didn't stuff the ISO committees, or bribe Nigerian distributors, nor sabotage the OLPC, hide illegal agreements violating the GPL behind NDAs.... and the list goes on and on and on...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There's more than one way to analyse that table, and the one MS have chosen is not the most obvious one. On a simple total of the time to render all 25, it's a tie: IE at 88.30 seconds and Chrome at 88.32 seconds have a difference well within measurement error, so clearly the competitive advantage isn't as great as you think. Firefox definitely trails, but at 95.62 seconds it's only 8% behind.
That's right, IE is so bad, I risk disciplinary action to avoid having to use IE.
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And the emulation is so good, that accessing a floppy drive freezes all activity on the entire machine, simply because the original circa 1980 IBM PC power supply was only capable of supplying 87.5 Watts.
There's a limit to how far you should go with backwards compatibility.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You leave your browser open while playing games? Doesn't that eat up memory and cause slowdown?
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Games? Here's a dollar, kid. Go buy yourself a nice candy bar while the adults talk.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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).
Fast, Good and Cheap: Pick any Two
MS certainly didn't pick Good !
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Explorer has real rendering problems to resolve. The speed issue, to me, is MS posturing but the rendering part is a very big deal. Why doesn't ms use the same engine as chrome, firefox and Safari and leave it at that. I am a web developer who goes crazy when dealing with Explorer. Morgan's post is spot on BTW.
"Never stop questioning" - Einstein
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?
"Fun"? Unix terminals are "fun". Now get the fuck off my lawn!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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!
Looking at the mean (a more accurate measure of browser performance than simply a count of how many sites its best at), Chrome comes in first at 3.4s, followed by IE at 3.5s and Firefox at 3.8s.
Of course Microsoft is gonna say this. And it's absolutely no different than Firefox's slogan of "Faster, Safer, Better". Two of those statements are outright false, and one is complete opinion. Yet people let Mozilla get away with using this line without a single complaint. Apple does the same bullshit with promoting Safari, and we don't hear a peep out of people then either.
Bottom line is, don't be a hypocrite just because of some childish need to hate Microsoft. Apple = Microsoft = Mozilla. There is zero difference when it comes to a company wanting to make money.
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.
Sorry games are fun.
You should try games that aren't sorry, they're even better.
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
The speed at which Firefox starts and the time to load pages is heavily dependent on the extensions in use. For me, Firefox startup is pretty slow (about 5 seconds) because of my pretty extensive Adblock lists. Most pages load quite fast, helped by the Adblock lists. The speed at which Internet Explorer starts and loads pages is heavily dependent on how long ago a fresh install was done. Until the malware starts accumulating it can be pretty reasonable.
It also helps to benchmark your beta or release candidate against two point releases back of your most feared competitor who also has a beta available. Why is this IE8 vs. Firefox 3.0.5 rather than IE 7 vs. FF 3.0.x and IE8 vs. Firefox 3.1beta? I think we know. FF 3.1 beta must eat IE8's lunch.
Some people are still in college and only have enough money to eat ramen, let alone upgrade their machines.
Sell the microwave you're using to cook the Ramen noodles and any hotplates you have and get one of the MacBook Pros with the Nvidia 9600M graphics chips in there. That way, you'll have a new computer and you'll still be able to cook your Ramen noodles on the MBP near the graphics chip!
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Yes I leave my browser on all day.
However I also reboot my system every day when I wake up to save energy and incidentally $$$$. Unless we are talking about a server why should a computer be on when you are asleep*? That is just irrationally wasteful and when aggregated over millions of users probably to the tune of wasting a who power plants worth of electricity a year, ie hundreds of thousand of tons of carbon. Your uptime bragging rights are NOT worth making global warming worse.
*Admittedly some people may be downloading torrents or doing distributed computing, but does that have to be EVERY night?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?