Internet Explorer 9 is 'crazy fast' according to Microsoft, but the Sunspider JavaScript results published by the company show that the latest browser from Redmond still lags behind many of its rivals.
The Sunspider results have become a familiar metric in how fast browsers are judged to be, and Microsoft's IE8 was judged harshly for its poor performance.
At the preview event for IE9 at MIX, Microsoft's Principal Program Lead Jason Weber insisted that the latest version of Internet Explorer would 'change the way you think' with its speed.
And yet, Microsoft's own published results confirm that the latest build of Apple's Safari browser, Opera and Google's Chrome are all still faster.
Weber justifies the difference between its 604 score and Opera 10.50's 287 as "less than one eye blink", pointing out that major changes under the bonnet of Internet Explorer will have a great impact on web browsing.
Those changes include a new JavaScript compiler that speeds up scripts without by passing them on to the second core on dual core PCs and a rendering engine that uses the Direct2D hardware graphics acceleration that's in Windows Vista and 7.
"We're speeding up the real Web today," says Webber; "we believe we've sped up everything by 10 or 11 per cent".
In truth, the results do show a massive performance boost for Internet Explorer, and push it past the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.
The real world difference between the main browsers are now negligible - fractions of a second and unlikely to affect user experience or even be noticeable to the vast majority.
Microsoft will feel that in keeping up with the Joneses, it makes the speed race less important and allows more focus on IE's security, privacy and other enhancements to real-world browsing.
But, with Apple and Google both working on their next generation browsers, questions are likely to be raised over how fast IE9 will be in comparison to its rivals when it finally becomes available to the public.
Your comments (7) Click to add a new comment
bkulasse
May 4th 2010
7. i think that we are good at all to use all of the software in the whole world.
indeed, what do we do to use that ? for browsing right ? so do that properly, and don't think bout the software, we are just consumer, so use that whatcha think is better than other,
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henrystaples
April 21st 2010
6. Having IE9 run appreciably faster is important. I do a lot of SharePoint development and SP2007 is tightly integrated with IE; much so that the basic users cannot move away from using IE for accessing SharePoint. SP is dreadfully slow in IE8, an order of magnitude slower than Chrome. Microsoft's solution is that they've rewritten SP2010's rendering engine and have sped up IE9. SP2010, for us, as for a series of large organizations, won't be deployed until 2012. So, getting a faster IE deployed this year would help our users tremendously every day.
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chillzatl
March 17th 2010
5. Who cares about speed. The performance difference between these browsers is so small it's dumb to even discuss it. Security is what matters and IE has become among the most secure available (2nd only to Chrome).
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teamcolab
March 17th 2010
4. Who cares about how fast IE is if it doesn't work? Internet Explorer 8 still does not support CSS3.
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limpdo
March 17th 2010
3. Pretty interesting indeed, but with Firefox out tehre and avaialble, why would anyone use anyting else?
Lou
www.anon-vpn.net.tc
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wb8erj
March 17th 2010
2. Sorry Microsoft, but I'm done with your stuff. I want as little to do with you as possible.
Go FireFox!
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bradavon
March 16th 2010
1. To be fair, there isn't much between IE9, Chrome and Safari. Even Firefox looks acceptable. I never realised Opera 10.50 was so much better than Opera 10.10.
It doesn't have to be better than Chrome, just acceptable. IE especially needs to be nippy simply because there will always be a large portion who will never move away from it. So at least if Windows Update upgrades their PCs to IE9, they'll get a faster browser.
IE8 is frankly slower and clunkier than IE7. I hate IE8, (if I had to choose) give me IE7 any day. IE7 is easily the best MS browser to date. Accelerators are nice but when the browser otherwise is so awful, who cares?
If MS can finally make IE nippy in operation and fast at page load. We'll finally have a good and solid browser. Not taking into account it's security issues or lack of extensions support.
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