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IE8 faster than Chrome or Firefox on more top web sites

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horse-race-250My teammate Jon Box pointed out something today on browser  performance that caught my eye: these videos showing browser performance for Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, and Firefox (go to the “Case Study Videos” section at the bottom of the page). 

As it turns out, IE8 is most often the fastest browser to load the top 25 most visited web sites.  Of course, some sites were faster in Chrome and some were faster in Firefox, but overall 5 of the top 10 web sites were faster in IE8, as were 12 of the top 25.

Perhaps the bigger story is that even when one browser is faster than another, the differences are measured in either hundredths or tenths of seconds….  In other words, load times are so close that it’s hard to notice a difference at all in real world use.

Technorati Tags: IE8,performance

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2009
    As webpages get increasingly complex the slow browser will get noticeable performance issues. Don't tell me you can't "feel" Chrome's speed advantage compared to IE, in all the situations where it is faster.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2009
    Yep, the more you try to load into a web page, the more performance is important.  That's why I'm a Silverlight fan - at some point, it makes sense to move the processing over to managed code and/or tap into the power of the GPU. To answer your question on Chrome, though: no - based on the video, I don't think I would "feel" much of a difference between Chrome and IE8... Full disclosure: I haven't run Chrome since it was launched/leaked last fall, so my personal experience is a bit out of date. Since it will come up anyway, I'll just volunteer now that I decided to uninstall Chrome after I read the EULA and how Google treats data ownership.  In a nutshell, they wanted to own everything I viewed through Chrome.  Nice. (Not).  :(   See here for more on that topic: http://bit.ly/mmJcq

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2009
    Keep in mind that these comparisons were done with Firefox 3.0 which is now outdated with 3.5 which is reportedly much faster, and Chrome 1.0 which is now at 2.0 stable I believe.

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2009
    Good point, Stephen!  It's great to see competition driving browsers to get better.