![]() ![]() That said, it is encouraging to see browser vendors compete with each other, and aim to ship the fastest Web browsers they possibly can. Youll know yourself that your standard Chrome or Firefox browser. If you use Firefox and are happy with it, you may as well stick with it. The arrogance to think software needed updating just four times in ten years is mind-boggling. Due to the fact that broadband connections are so commonplace today, and the fact that browsers in general can load pages faster than they could even a couple years ago, the page load time differences between the two are relatively moot. In practical, everyday use, you likely won’t notice much of a difference between IE 8 and Firefox 3. Also of note: on average, IE 8 loaded Apple’s home page nearly twice as quickly as Firefox. One notable exception, however, was in loading the English-language Wikipedia home page, where IE 8 beat out Firefox by an average of one second (IE 8 took about 2.2 seconds to load the page on average, while Firefox 3 took about 3.3 seconds). In most of our testing, IE 8’s advantage was half a second or less. However, IE 8’s performance advantage is relatively negligible. The Speed-Test Resultsīy and large, we found that Internet Explorer 8 performed well, and beat out Firefox 3.0.7 in the majority of our time trials. Given this, we took into account visual indications of a page’s loading progress, rather than relying on what the browser’s progress bars told us. Have all the images appeared? Are there elements of the page that have yet to load even though the browser’s status indicator suggests otherwise? These are questions we take into account when testing browsers. Additionally, we removed the two best and two worst scores for each page load test to produce more consistent results.īrowser testing can be tricky, as different browsers measure page loading progress differently, so getting a read of page load times strictly by the browser’s progress bar could result in inaccurate or inconsistent results. To ensure consistent results, we performed testing on a fresh Windows Vista installation, and we reinstalled the operating system before each round of testing. ![]() We also repeated the load tests to ensure that we had sufficient data to identify loading speed trends. Prior to each test run, we cleared the browsers’ caches as well. Firefox was created by Mozilla as a faster, more private alternative to browsers like Internet Explorer, and now Chrome. We loaded each site ten times in each of the browsers and repeated the process the following day to rule out any network traffic or server issues. To ensure we could gather as accurate page-loading times as possible, we recorded our testing sessions for review later on. We used a set of nine popular Web sites in our testing: Amazon, MySpace, Yahoo, PC World, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Wikipedia. Artwork: Chip TaylorIn our browser speed comparison, we pitted a near-final build of Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox 3.0.7, the current non-beta version of Mozilla’s browser. ![]()
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