Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox 532
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.'"
Really (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it for myself.
speed is everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
IE8 doesn't even have full CSS3 support. No corner-radius? What the heck is MS thinking?
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.
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.
Dog bites man (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:you are not looking (Score:0, Insightful)
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!
Re:But IE8 doesn't work with Slashdot correctly. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:speed is everything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupidy, stupidy, stupidy... (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:No Opera? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:speed is everything? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't think firefox should be caching hostnames, your OS should be. Otherwise, if you wanted to flush your DNS hostname cache, you'd have to flush the OS cache, and then the firefox cache.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Re:speed is everything? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason that everybody is still using the IE.
Because they CAN
It's always the lame excuse of "But we lose clients!".
Then a leading company comes along, and changes the game.
Now everybody else jumps to that train too. Suddenly it's OK.
So the client is forced to update.
And if you were not the leading company, that's why you will always be playing catch-up, until you're bankrupt.
I worked for too long in that business to have any doubt about how this works.
You always get the users/clients/girls/friends you expect. Only that sometimes there are little exceptions. If you bite, and adapt, you will be worse off. But there will still be little exceptions. (Like that one retard client, telling you that he still does find it too complicated.)
The solution is to simply do what you want. As they say: Do not imitate. Innovate.
Yes it can be risky. But you will be far better off in the long run.
Re:speed is everything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup, speed is everything, all right. Especially when almost all of the instances are less than a second apart. Many are even withing a half second of each other.
I just finished a few of my own (very unscientific) tests, and in all but Adobe and 163, the pages was loaded before I got my mouse from the address bar to the scroller.
Granted, my system isn't exactly "low-end," but it isn't new, either. It is almost three years old, and was fairly high-end when I built it.
Still, looking only at the times MS has, I don't get why they are trumpeting differences that are negligible, at best.
No, wait, let me correct myself.
Looking only at the times that these speed tests that companies are so fond of put out, I don't get why ANYBODY bothers to trumpet differences that are negligible, at best.
Sadly, the lay-man will likely look at these numbers and think they actually mean something.
Anyway, if speed is desired, go with Opera. If Opera were open-source and had viable StumbleUpon support, it would be the perfect browser.
Re:statistics... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Scientific? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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'?
Google.com (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:you are not looking (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah? Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
More like:
"My [unreleased Microsoft software] is [theoretically superior] to your [available and fully released software]."
This covers all MS marketing from the dawn of time.
"Don't buy our competitor, we're working on a product which will blow theirs away!"
Every time, in every market, this is their script. When will people learn?
In the case of IE8 performance, what they don't mention is that page render time is mostly irrelevant. The difference between the most performant and least performant browsers are not significant on modern hardware. What you'll really notice--and where Firefox is far ahead of *released* versions of IE--is JavaScript performance. Almost every site of modest complexity uses *some* javascript, these days, and 'web app' sites use a *lot*.
It's the old "benchmark something irrelevant" trick. Gives good numbers, fools the uninitiated.
Re:Javascript ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, every site uses Javascript, but only to track users or fix browsers bugs.
Instead, take a site like GMail, which relies heavily on Javascript, and just open it with IE.
IE is very slow on large pages, when you use JS to manipulate the DOM.
Re:you are not looking (Score:2, Insightful)
Their own data shows Chrome is faster, not IE... (Score:2, Insightful)
Who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:you are not looking (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fair comparison... (Score:3, Insightful)
IE not being portable doesn't keep them from testing it on XP or Vista, nor from testing IE * which isn't released against Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (or beta 3 now). Instead they're announcing results for IE 8, which hasn't been released, against Firefox 3.0.5, which has already been superseded by two more point releases. Chrome, BTW, is up to 1.0.1.154.48 right now. 1.0.0 isn't exactly a fair test against IE 8, either.
How about they test their released software against the competition's released software and their betas and release candidates against the competition's betas and release candidates?
Reboot your desktop please! (Score:3, Insightful)
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?