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After reading Steve Souders' article on IE8 speed enhancements, I became curious about how page download times in IE8 stacked up against the latest beta of Firefox (3.0b5). I realize that both of these browsers are in beta so the release product may be signficantly different. Also, please keep in mind these results are not very scientific (obviously). To obtain download times, I used Fiddler for Internet Explorer and Firebug for Firefox.
First off, I loaded a several higher volume websites to compare page download times. Each page was loaded three times (for extreme statistical accuracy :P) and the average load time was calculated.
Finally, I ran Steve Souders' Parellel downloads test; the results were almost identical.
It was really odd to me that Google News loaded almost two times as fast on Firefox while all the other sites loaded close to the same speed or slightly faster on Internet Explorer. The only difference I notice off the bat is the number of JS/CSS files; maybe its something to do with that? It would be very interesting to see how the browsers compare when rendering pages. Have you found results similar to this or know of a good way to test render time? Let me know what you think.
April 3. 2008 12:17
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April 3. 2008 13:00
I wonder if this is just due to downloading 6 parallel resources from a single server. In firefox, type "about:config" in the url box and use "max" as a filter. You can then modify these: network.http.max-connections-per-server network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
Anon
April 3. 2008 14:11
Just out of curiosity, why didn't you use Fiddler to obtain download times for <i>both</i> browsers? Using Fiddler with Firefox takes an extra click or two than it does with IE, but it's very doable and would eliminate one variable in your test.
Seth Petry-Johnson
April 3. 2008 15:14
FF3 beta 5 smokes IE8 ..IE8 is bugged and dogged and will never match FF3 - too little, too late. I'm a .NET developer and a diehart MS junkie but I've long accepted the fact that open source browsing is the way to go ...and MS still clings to their shitty trident rendering engine. They need to "get over it" already.
dimitri colomvakos
April 3. 2008 16:59
Try sites like digg, gmail.
gman
April 4. 2008 02:15
It was really odd to me that Google News loaded almost two times as fast on Firefox while all the other sites loaded close to the same speed Google Reader is taking havy use of JavaScript - and even tho JavaScript works quite fast in all versions of IE, recent betas of Firefox had the JS speed improvet greatly.
BTM
April 4. 2008 03:15
I would've thought this is a slightly inaccurate way to test rendering performance as the experiment is poorly controlled. There are too many exogenous variables - bandwidth at that given time, server load etc. Rather try run javascript and resource intensive pages locally and use those figures.
Robert Hofmeyr
April 4. 2008 06:32
@Robert This is definitely not a scientifically accurate test. It was more or less something that I was curious about and wanted to get a quick initial impression. I would really like to compare render time at some point.
Ryan Lanciaux
April 4. 2008 08:49
Now compare javascript performance!
Will Sullivan
April 4. 2008 09:40
<-- Gravatar now sucks. They removed PNG support to "better support" browsers. O_o
April 9. 2008 09:26
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April 12. 2008 18:33
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July 23. 2008 23:10