Microsoft has been taking lot of heat as IE8 has been shown to be way slower than other competing browsers in various tests done by tech journalists. Microsoft has posted a video showcasing that IE8 is faster than Firefox and Google Chrome on average when loading top 25 most visited websites. According to Microsoft existing browser benchmarking tools available today are either narrow in their scope (SunSpider, Celtic Kane), inaccurate (iBench), or don’t consider important factors such as network latency, network congestion and caching.

Internet Explorer team created a real world test, which took the above-mentioned factors into consideration and created a level playing field for all browser tested. The video above shows results when comparing Internet Explorer 8 page load times to Firefox and Chrome.

Based on the test done on top 25 most popular sites in the world, IE8 wins 48 percent of the time, Chrome wins 36 percent of the time and Firefox only wins 16 percent of the time.

Lets analyze the results, most of the top 25 websites are basic websites that don’t use much Java or Ajax (at least not on the home page). Java and Ajax are the two most important web technologies as they are used to being desktop like applications over Internet. And IE8 falls behind while running these two technologies. If you see most tests done by tech journalists they use SunSpider as it measures Java performance, which is and will be a very important factor in web application development. Basically, it’s not the login page of a website that you use, it’s applications after login page that you use and they should load faster.

We are also surprised that Microsoft didn’t use Apple’s Safari 4 web browser in the test, which is now considered the fastest web browser in the world by most tech journalists. We can bet that the results would have looked very different if Safari 4 was one of the browser in this browser war.
[Via Windows Blog]