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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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A more useful test would perhaps be testing firefox 3.5 vs ie8 and chrome 2.0? Firefox 3 is already getting "old".
Sure it loads up sites faster, that's because microsoft left out all the code that renders the web pages properly . . .
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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
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
IE8 doesn't even have full CSS3 support. No corner-radius? What the heck is MS thinking?
And you Sir, are clueless as to the current state of CSS3.
Huge parts of the standard are still in the working draft stage.
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work
Supporting a subset of CSS2 or CSS3 correctly is much more important. Bugs are far worse problems than omissions.
.: Max Romantschuk
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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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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It's just like I say with sex...
I may not be good, but at least I'm fast.
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.
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.
BR>Actually it probably doing exactly what it should be doing. It's the job of the OS to manage the details of DNS resolution. Having applications do things like caching DNS lookups adds complexity to the application and causes all sorts of problems when they application writer dosn't know exactly what they are doing.
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...
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Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
oh no! don't say that! slashdot's readship will be more than halved as all those who hate Fox News but love Firefox will suffer from exploding head syndrome.
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