IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Use Face-Off

An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."

Comments

Re:oh, come on.

[feepness]

(gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).

Yeah, that would be the phishing malware screwing with you.

Who cares?

[Goonie]

I use Firefox and IE regularly, have played with Chrome, and occasionally use Safari on the Macs at work.

I honestly can't notice any difference between any of them in rendering speed.

99.99% of the time, web browsing performance is network-limited anyway.

Surely standards support and browser stability are more important features, at least on platforms with more grunt than an iphone?

Re:Too late for a film at 11 joke...

[beelsebob]

Actually, these results look very similar to the ones the WebKit guys (both chrome and safari teams) publish. They're almost always saying chrome and safari are similarly fast in the lead, firefox lags slightly, and IE8 is way slower... These are the same results as here. It just appears that IE9 is now added to the pile, and added at the top.

So what have we learned
1) Mozilla are good at lying about benchmarks (actually, we already knew that, they've been claiming the next big firefox release would be faster than everything for a while now)
2) IE9 is quick

The question is... is IE9 correct. I'll take works correctly but takes time over doin it rong quickly any day.

useless benchmark, horrible summary

[macshit]

I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?

It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.

Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).

The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.

Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...

Fuck this shit

[Massacrifice]

Really, fuck it. I've had it with corporate-sponsored dick-fighting contest about which browser is the fastest. I really, really couldn't care any less. Features, openness, security, standards compliance, yeah. But If I want a fast app, I'll go native, thank you. Maybe I'm too old, but I've always thought HTML sucked as a programming paradigm. As an information distribution mechanism, sure. But for interactivity? Please. It's about time somebody called bullshit on this. Hell, a goddamn Visual Basic app from fifteen years ago kicked the butt of most modern web sites in usability, performance and ease of maintenance. The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions. Just like TV. No thanks for dumbing it down to this. And now you wanna make it faster? Piss off. Go write real code that does something, not just another abstraction layer.