Today we heard about a recent study completed by web performance management firm New Relic. The study confirmed that when it comes to real world page load times - Internet Explorer 9 is fastest on Windows. The study can be found here: http://blog.newrelic.com/2012/04/05/fastest-browsers/
New Relic found that IE9 loaded pages, on average, half a second faster than both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. What is worthy of note regarding New Relic's study and resulting data is their test methodology. As they note on their blog, New Relic is “sitting on what can plausibly be considered the world’s largest database of application performance data in existence.” In this study, they captured 690,000 page views per minute of real-time performance data that came directly from the browser across an extensive network of sites and users.
New Relic's findings mirror the results from web performance experts at Strangeloop, who in January found that IE9 and Firefox were both about 5% faster than Chrome at loading real websites.
There are a lot of web performance benchmarks out there, often built by browser makers in fact. And based on their design, they can often obscure real-world browser performance. New Relic is well positioned to able to comment credibly on the state of web performance from the end user perspective due to its reach (monitors 150,000 unique domains on the internet) and its test methodology. It’s great to see New Relic’s focus on the actual user experience when it comes to performance on the web.
Our Commitment to Real World Performance:
For over a year we have told you that what we care about on the IE team is real world performance, and our commitment is to making sure that Internet Explorer gives you the very best performance with the sites you love. Ensuring that level of performance starts with our testing and performance facilities here at Microsoft. Our engineering team recently posted a thorough blog post explaining exactly how we test, measure, and engineer Internet Explorer so it is fast where it counts – on the web pages you visit every day.
We will continue to push the web forward with our investments in hardware accelerated HTML5 - and what that means for Internet Explorer users is that the web is not going to just get faster, but richer and more dynamic than ever before.
If you haven't given Internet Explorer 9 a try lately we encourage you to test it out and see just how far Internet Explorer has come in the past year.
-Ryan Gavin, General Manager, Internet Explorer
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