Just before announcing that Internet Explorer 8 has been finalized, Microsoft has released a new report titled "Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analysis." The document explains the various browser and network components and how each piece can impact performance when benchmarking, capabilities and limitations of various benchmarking tools, as well as ways to design tests to avoid these issues. What makes this report extremely dubious is the chart that is buried at the bottom. It shows IE8 outperforming Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0, something that no other test on the Internet has ever shown before.
Before I start to rant and rave, I want to explain that I am an IE8 user (in fact this post was written using IE8 on Windows 7), though I do use other browsers from time to time. IE8 is a vast improvement over IE7, especially in performance, but I will be the first to admit that it still does not compete with third-party browsers when it comes to speed. However, the table Microsoft provides shows the load times for the top 25 websites according to comScore, and IE8 does quite well. The report notes that Microsoft "used the browser 'Done' indicator for timing when the page when the page is completely loaded at that point. For pages which continue to load and change after the 'one' indication we have used common visual cues to generate the timings. Timing is started when the Go button is pressed. These timings were captured in January 2009; because Internet content is always changing you may get different timings when you run these tests."
I'll be giving IE8 a chance, Firefox, safari and even chrome are serious memory hogs and add-ons or not one slow page load can freeze every tab or even the whole computer. I haven't been impressed with a browser since FF 2.0/2.1 VS my old IE
Chill guys..
MS is the best, their softwares like windows and office rocks, stop harrassing MS guys, .
After all, its because of MS that today we are on this forum, using windows vista and IE 8. :D
Wow, that's very interesting. I have been using Chrome and IE8. Chrome seems to be way faster. I guess like the story says....internet content is always changing. It's sure seems Chrome is faster to me. I will give IE8 a try when it's done and evaluate it. Thanks for the story.
As far as i know google chrome can be defined as spyware so i wouldnt have even included it in the tests.
As for ie8 being the fastest its still not enough to drag me away from firefox as iv got so many add-ons in firefox it would take ages to find a way to do these in ie8. It'll take a truly unique feature that no other browser has to make me go back to internet explorer.
