Microsoft Captures Video of IE8 to Prove It's Faster

Even though it falls far behind other browser software’s such as Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox on standard JavaScript benchmarks such as Sun Spider, the company has been at pains to convince users that the browser(Browser fix) is a speed leader.

True, JavaScript performance has greatly improved in IE8 over IE7, but still trails other browsers by about five-fold. But Microsoft's Dean Hachamtovitch, who heads up the IE8 team, contends that scripting performance is not the number-one determinant of browsing speed. The company has set up a testing lab with a high-speed camera to compare actual page loading times for the top 26 websites (based on comScore MediaMetrix data), and they've released a video showing the results.

Microsoft reps told us that this video would be appearing on the main Internet Explorer page eventually. A white paper diving more deeply into the testing methodology and results has also been issued.

The video is pretty much a text slideshow, making the point that benchmarks don't tell the whole story about web browsing speed: significant factors include network connectivity, latency, resource competition, and caching in the browser and router. The testing compares IE8 with older IE versions, as well as against shipping versions of Firefox and Chrome. Micrsoft tests the top 25 sites daily, and tens of thousands of other sites each month.

The first test site in the video shows why you need a high-speed video camera: it shows loading Google in the three browsers, and because that site is pretty light and quick to load, it's pretty much impossible to tell which browser loads fastest. The high-speed camera shows IE coming in just a couple milliseconds ahead of Firefox and 10 ms faster than Chrome. The conclusion is that Internet Explorer comes out ahead two out of three times, and in some cases the differences are measured in seconds rather than milliseconds. IE comes out ahead on three times as many sites as Firefox. The breakdown for the top ten websites from Microsoft's testing is in the graphic at the top of the page.

Some of the more amusing results in this list are how Chrome wins for MSN.com, Firefox wins for Microsoft.com, and IE wins for Mozilla.com, Google.com, and for Microsoft's rival, Apple.com, by a good margin. It makes a case that Microsoft is being candid with these results that they'd publish better times for competitors' browsers on their own sites. It is also noticeable, that for most sites, the differences are pretty minor. (Microsoft's video mentions that the average eye blink takes .32 seconds—a longer time than many of the differences in these results.)
Microsoft makes a pretty good case that this kind of testing is more relevant than artificial scripting benchmarks, and the white paper makes for good reading on the topic. I'd be interested to see whether the other browser makers try to come up with a similar real-world testing methodology. I also still question why Microsoft, with its vast programming resources to draw upon, cannot come up with a JavaScript engine that's at least in the performance ballpark with those from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The answer I always receive is, "IE has actually improved JavaSeript performance, but we're focusing on other performance bottlenecks that have greater impact on real-world browsing."

Fair enough. But if the future of the net is Web applicationss, which rely heavily on scripting, Internet Explorer will need to catch up with the competition in rendering script

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