Even the best ones only test certain scenarios, and no matter how good SunSpider is, it doesn’t claim to be a well-rounded browser benchmark–just a JavaScript one. If nothing else, I think Microsoft is performing a service–a self-serving one in this case, but a service nonetheless–by reminding us that all benchmarks are inherently limited. I’m guessing Microsoft will contend that there’s more to fast browsing than can be measured by any benchmark–it’s also about how quickly you can perform typical tasks, how easy it is to wrangle tabs and find stuff online, how well the browser recovers from problems, and the like. The Microsoft video ends with a line about staying tuned for more info. I don’t know enough about i-Bench (I believe Apple uses a custom version based on a discontinued Veritest benchmark) to have an opinion about how well-rounded it is. They too make Safari look zippy and both IE 7 and IE 8 look sluggish. Then there’s the fact that while most chatter about Safari’s speed involves JavaScript, Apple has also published results for the i-Bench HTML benchmark. And I suspect that some knowledgeable folks will argue that Microsoft is downplaying JavaScript’s importance simply because IE’s JavaScript is still slow. JavaScript becomes more important as you do tasks in sophisticated Web-based apps–for instance, I’d love to see a well-done benchmark involving how long it takes to perform major e-mail tasks in Gmail in major browsers. And while simply loading a major site’s home page is certainly one valid way to test a major aspect of Web performance, it too isn’t definitive. It used the shipping version of Firefox, not the speedier beta, and didn’t include Safari or Chrome at all. Here’s an image from the video:Īs with benchmarks of any sort, it’s possible to spend all day poking holes in Microsoft’s tests if you feel like it. Its own benchmarking involved timing how long it takes IE 8, Firefox 3.0, and Chrome 1.0 to load the 25 largest Web sites, a process that tests not only JavaScript but also how long it takes a browser to render the page and other factors. Microsoft says–correctly–that browser speed is about more than JavaScript. IE 8 performs better in such benchmarks than IE 7 (as witness its better results in the Safari 4 story I link to above) but still lags other browsers. And much of the work that browser companies have done to ramp up speed involves optimizing their JavaScript engines. Why the disparity? On a high level, it boils down to one thing: Nearly all discussion of browser speed centers on performance of JavaScript code, most often as measured by the SunSpider benchmark. I met with IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch last week, and he made the same claim. In fact, it says that Internet Explorer 8 is not only competitive, but loads many of the world’s most popular Web sites faster than Firefox 3.0 or Chrome 1.0. Here’s a stunner: It’s not concluding that IE is a horribly slow browser. It’s done its own speed benchmarks and has created a video about them and published a white paper about browser benchmarking. Opera says that its alpha of Opera 10 is “30% faster.”Īnd Microsoft? Well, mostly it’s had to contend with coverage like this story that reports that Safari is forty-two times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and six times faster than IE 8. The first thing Google tells you about Chrome is that it’s “faster.” Better performance is a key feature in Mozilla’s upcoming Firefox 3.5. Apple says its beta version of Safari 4 is the world’s fastest browser. In recent months, the hottest topic in the world of Web browsing has been speed.
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