Microsoft: IE8 faster than Firefox, Chrome
Microsoft Corp. said this week that its own speed tests prove Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is faster than either Firefox or Chrome.
In a report released Wednesday, Microsoft spelled out how it tests browsers in-house, and again stressed that it doesn't buy the idea that benchmarks -- such as those that score JavaScript performance -- accurately compare the players. "These benchmarks necessarily characterize only a narrow set of the browser functions in a very constrained way," Microsoft's report said. "End users, however, do not operate in a controlled environment."
Microsoft's tests pitted IE8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), which launched in late January, against Google Inc.'s Chrome 1.0 and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox 3.0.5, a version from mid-December. The company timed how long it took each browser to completely render the 25 most popular destinations on the Web, as ranked by the Web metrics firm comScore Inc., which included google.com, facebook.com, amazon.com and others.
