Microsoft claims that IE8 is faster than competitors, and the monitoring method is too complicated.

According to foreign media reports, Microsoft released a White Paper on Wednesday, saying that the test results of a Microsoft internal laboratory showed that the overall speed of Microsoft IE 8 browser was higher than that of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox) two competing products.

Microsoft said it had previously compared and tested Microsoft IE 8 (currently RC1), Chrome 1.0, and Firefox 3.0.5, but did not include Apple Safari or Norwegian Opera. Previously, Apple and Opera both said that the overall browsing speed of their products was the fastest.

Microsoft said that the company's technical testers compared IE, Chrome, and Firefox on 25 popular websites around the world. Test results show that IE 8 runs the fastest on 12 of the websites, with 9 Chrome websites and Firefox leading the way on only 4 websites. In fact, before Microsoft officially released the White Paper, many Microsoft executives have cited the data of the test results in a variety of public occasions.

Test Indicators

In terms of browser speed comparison testing, the industry currently adopts a variety of standards, such as JavaScript rendering speed, Celtic Kane, V8 and other testing tools and standards. Microsoft said that these indicators have no significance for common users. Therefore, in this comparative test, a more obvious standard is adopted: the time for each browser to completely load the same web page.

To this end, Microsoft's lab uses a dedicated tool to monitor the loading time of web pages, so that its time statistics are accurate to 1/30 seconds. To ensure the accuracy of the comparison test data, Microsoft labs installed IE, Chrome, and Firefox on three PCs with the same hardware configuration and operating system environment.

Microsoft also said that during the above comparison test, it also tested the page loading speed after the three browsers installed the basic plug-in. These three basic plug-ins are Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Media Player. However, Microsoft did not publish the ranking data on the speed of the three browsers after installing plug-ins.

According to industry insiders, Microsoft has two shortcomings in this comparative test: first, it is difficult for the outside world to reproduce (that is, to imitate) Microsoft's test because of the complexity of monitoring methods. Second, the sample size of the website used in Microsoft testing is too small. 25 websites cannot fully reflect the loading time of these three browsers.

1. Added the "one-click Close add-on" function in IE8 browser.
2. New perspectives of mainstream browser market war