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IE 9 Beta Strips Down For Speed
CWmike writes "Those who have written off IE as being slow and old-looking are in for a surprise. The just-released Internet Explorer 9 beta is dramatically faster than its predecessor, sports an elegant, stripped-down interface and adds some useful new features, writes Preston Gralla. Even more surprising than the stripped-down interface is IE9 beta's speed. Internet Explorer has long been the slowest browser by a wide margin. IE9 has turned that around in dramatic fashion, using hardware acceleration and a new JavaScript engine it calls Chakra, which compiles scripts in the background and uses multiple processor cores. In this beta, my tests show it overtaking Firefox for speed, and putting up a respectable showing against Safari, Opera and Chrome. It's even integrated into Windows 7. One big problem: It will not work on Windows XP. So, forget the performance and security boost, many enterprises and netbook users."
They give you viruses as well if you're not careful.
Internet Explorer 9 Reviewed, Benchmarked
XP is supported until 2014.
Gone!
Which is one of a very long list of things that make me unhappy with Sharepoint, it's everything including the kitchen sink but doesn't seem to do anything very well.
Efficiencies can be found by optimizing the workflow in which case IE 9 optimally takes advantage of GPU or multiple cores for better performance.
System is a Core i7 860 (2.8GHz) 8GB RAM, a Radeon 5750 1GB. OS is Windows 7 64-bit, all patches current as of today. It is running the browser and Outlook, plus background apps so not a clean benchmark system but a pretty realistic light workload. Safari is not included because I am not willing to install all the system services they want to have.
Sunspider
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Firefox 3.6.9: 601.8ms +/- 1.0%
IE9 Beta: 291.6ms +/- 0.6%
Chrome 6.0.472.59: 215.8ms +/- 2.7%
Opera 10.62: 237.0ms +/- 1.5%
Kraken
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Firefox 3.6.9: 13928.4ms +/- 0.5%
IE9 Beta: Fails to function properly.
Chrome 6.0.472.59: 12343.7ms +/- 0.6%
Opera 10.62: 10114.7ms +/- 0.5%
Peacekeeper
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Firefox 3.6.9: 3612
Rendering 3050
Social networking 3109
Complex graphics 6482
Data 4819
DOM operations 3132
Text parsing 4300
IE9 Beta:3256 Has compatibility issues with their software to test the system which might cause results problems.
Rendering 2534
Social networking 1703
Complex graphics 7941
Data 6834
DOM operations 2530
Text parsing 4893
Chrome 6.0.472.59: 10988 Canvas results were visibly different from other browsers.
Rendering 7051
Social networking 6863
Complex graphics 21211
Data 23624
DOM operations 8173
Text parsing 17145
Opera 10.62: 11510
Rendering 11900
Social networking 8471
Complex graphics 18830
Data 8937
DOM operations 10291
Text parsing 21797
I would caution against taking any of this too seriously for actual browser performance. The first two tests are 100% synthetic, no rendering at all, and the Futuremark test is rather strange and artificial, as their tests usually are (their graphics card benchmarks are notorious for not reflecting how GPUs work in the real world).
For useful tests you need something that is testing actual pages rendering how someone would actually use things. Video playback, an interactive game, etc. All these benchmarks strike me as contrived, not realistic.
It handles multiple tabs about as poorly as you can expect it to. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars/2 (scroll about 1/2 way down)
Basically it just crowds out until the tabs are rendered useless then if helpfully puts scroll arrows after you can't read what's inside the tab anymore.
This word "efficiency" ... it does not mean what you think it means.
Arguing that making more efficient use of existing hardware doesn't constitute making your browser more efficient is mere semantics. This is one of those points that is relative to where you are standing.