Slashdot Log In
Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Mar 12, 2009 07:55 AM
from the well-we-all-have-to-design-for-the-broken-thing dept.
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.'"
Related Stories
Submission: Microsoft: IE faster than Chrome and Firefox by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
mozilla.com (Score:5, Funny)
Ofcourse IE loads mozilla.com faster, that's the only site you'd ever need to open with IE...
Re:mozilla.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Ofcourse IE loads mozilla.com faster, that's the only site you'd ever need to open with IE...
Strangely enough FF opens microsoft.com faster, and they publicly admit this.
Parent
Re:mozilla.com (Score:5, Funny)
I would say IE is faster too if I had a fully loaded chair pointed at my head.
Parent
speed is everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
IE8 doesn't even have full CSS3 support. No corner-radius? What the heck is MS thinking?
Re:speed is everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Speed is everything, which is why I don't use it. Maybe if it didn't take more than 2 seconds to open a new tab (CTRL+T), I would be able to give IE7 some credit.
Guess how long it takes on Firefox? Instant! No "Connecting..." or locking up!
Parent
Re:speed is everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:speed is everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [w3.org]
Supporting a subset of CSS2 or CSS3 correctly is much more important. Bugs are far worse problems than omissions.
Parent
Re:speed is everything? (Score:5, Interesting)
You bring up an interesting point. It seems that we're approaching territory where the marginal increase in speed really isn't that significant. At this point the need for the greater marginal increase in accuracy would be much more appreciated than speed.
That's why I have a hard time taking *any* of these software companies seriously when the only thing they can brag about is how incremental their speed increases are.
Parent
Re:speed is everything? (Score:5, Funny)
I may not be good, but at least I'm fast.
Parent
Re:speed is everything? (Score:4, Informative)
But the reality is that, until they can be driven to under 50% of the browser market share, they pretty much get to set the standard.
They, Microsoft, get to set the lowest common denominator, the truth is though that most designers will be using progressive enhancement meaning that Saf, FF, Op, Konq are getting a nicer overall look with slicker running features whilst MSIE is getting either a "degraded" view or a separately developed page (I'm considering MS targetted CSS to be separately developed).
Basically, as a web designer since 1996-ish (and commercially for the last 5 years or so) I consider that MSIE has been holding things back all along. Less so now, but they're still not leading the way.
As for CSS3. If MS had included some basics, like rounded corners and columns, then we could have started making some headway with a less hacked together internet. Moz and Webkit have these things already waiting for the spec to be finished.
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html [quirksmode.org]
Parent
Re:"Marketshare sets the standard" (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were one big company, and controlled 75% of the market share, of course they would. Let's say this super car company existed. And all the cars they built were tall and so required 7' of clearance. Now some worldwide body comes along and says the real "standard" for cars is that they should require no more than 5' of clearance. And a few smaller startup car companies embrace that 5' standard and start building shorter cars (and they capture about 20-25% of the market).
Now, you're building a fast-food business in the U.S. and your building the cover for the drive-thru. Do you build it to 5' just because some international body said that was the "standard" or do you recognize the REAL standard and build it to at least 7'?
Parent
Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh well (Score:5, 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.
Parent
So half the time they are better? (Score:5, Interesting)
Riiight, sure. (Score:4, Funny)
I believe you.
Honest! I do!
Yea, right
Re:Riiight, sure. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Riiight, sure. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Fair comparison... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Speed not equal to good (Score:5, Informative)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
What about rendering ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What about rendering ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is indeed funny but that's quite possibly one of the reasons that makes it be faster. The more you support, the slower it gets and the more you have to optimize to get the same speed as a less complete implementation.
Their claims won't have much value until they get to the same level of standard support as the other browsers.
Parent
Let me fix this... (Score:4, Funny)
Dog bites man (Score:5, Insightful)
What it shows (Score:5, Interesting)
No Opera? (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 [microsoft.com]:
Re:No Opera? (Score:5, 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.
Parent
More details.. (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?
Javascript ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 !
Visual correcteness matters! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
On what platform did they test? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Cannot reproduce results (Score:5, Informative)
Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
MS also says that .... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Yes, but what they forgot to say (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but what they forgot to say is that IE is faster than Chrome and Firefox, combined!
Parent
Re:Really (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Funny)
Games? Here's a dollar, kid. Go buy yourself a nice candy bar while the adults talk.
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Funny)
"Fun"? Unix terminals are "fun". Now get the fuck off my lawn!
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
IE6? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
You can dream (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Parent
Re:You can dream (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:you are not looking (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point, and Firefox can't touch IE in terms of damage caused by becoming infected with a trojan.
Parent
Re:But IE8 doesn't work with Slashdot correctly. (Score:4, Funny)
I can't do online banking with Wachovia, and SLASHDOT corrcetly (sic)
Banking with Slashdot? Forget which browser you use - there's your problem!
If Slashdot were a bank, we'd have all sorts of problems with easily detectable duplication of small bills, and none other than Cowboy Neal for security. Also, instead of those little suckers you get at most banks, you'd probably end up being offered hot grits...
My money will be staying under the mattress, thanks!
Parent
Re:But IE8 doesn't work with Slashdot correctly. (Score:5, Funny)
Umm... considering how safe, secure and (since recently) stable banks are, I dunno if /. is the worse choice for your money.
Parent