Friday, October 20th, 2006
IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5
Ross Dargahi of Zimbra complained about IE 6 performance. Since IE 7 is here, he decided to retry his tests and see how Microsoft had done:
Microsoft’s IE team has clearly been hard at work on improving their browser’s memory management and JavaScript performance. IE 7 has made some significant leaps forward based on some initial in house testing here at Zimbra. We are in general observing about a 2x performance improvement with IE 7 vs IE 6 when using the Zimbra Web Client (ZWC).
As is well documented, IE 6 is notoriously bad at leaking memory, particularly due to circular references that include COM objects. The good news is that our tests indicate that this problem has been solved in IE 7. While in our test profile, it appears to consume more memory than Firefox, IE 7 seems to have solved the horrendous memory leaks exhibited in IE 6.
We also looked at the performance of Firefox, IE 6, and IE 7 over a set of common ZWC operations such as logging in, viewing messages, navigating around various folders, viewing contacts, and performing various calendar operations.
In conclusion, IE 7 has made some quite significant improvements over IE 6, both in terms of performance and memory management; however, there is still room to improve – particularly against Firefox, a challenge I hope the IE team will be taking up.
Uhm, shouldn’t that be “but twice as slow as Fx” or “but half as fast as Fx”?
“Half as slow” means “twice as fast”.
It would have been interesting to put FF2.0 into the mix to see if it has some performance improvements over FF1.5…
Lol Gonzalo, brings to mind the quote from Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings:
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
And since I have kids I also like the Veggie Tales version:
“I’m twice as tall as half of you and half as tall as twice of you”
It’s funny to see those results for me, because one area where Firefox is particularly slow (orders of magnitude slower than IE6) is dynamic rendering (via document.write, for instance). Having a faster javascript engine does not help much when rendering the code’s results takes so much more time than processing it.
Examples of affected website: 1 2
This site uses javascript to parse some structures to generate dynamic HTML based on the query string (similar to, say, storing the data in a compact javascript object to render it as a much lengthier HTML table, and sorted by various different criteria). Here (Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP) IE6 renders those pages almost instantly; Firefox takes several seconds frozen before it shows anything.
[...] Via Ajaxian descubro esta estadÃstica en la que demuestran que IE7 mejora en cuanto a rendimiento con respecto a IE6 llegando a doblar la velocidad si sumamos los distintos apartados de las pruebas, pero no llega a rozar la estela de Firefox que demuestra ser el doble de veloz que IE7. [...]
[...] 在 Ajaxian 看到利用 Zimbra Web Client 測試 IE7 跑 JavaScript 的速度：IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5，原文在 IE 7 vs IE 6 這篇。 [...]
How can you install a congoo netpass into this browser?
http://www.congoo.com
What about Firefox 2.0 ?
[...] via ajaxian: IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5 Ross Dargahi of Zimbra complained about IE 6 performance. Since IE 7 is here, he decided to retry his tests and see how Microsoft had done: Microsoft’s IE team has clearly been hard at work on improving their browser’s memory management and JavaScript performance. IE 7 has made some significant leaps forward based on some initial in house testing here at Zimbra. We are in general observing about a 2x performance improvement with IE 7 vs IE 6 when using the Zimbra Web Client (ZWC). [...]
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Firefox 2 has not seen much updates to the gecko engine that drives it, so likely javascript performance is not that different from 1.5. Firefox 3 will have a new version of the gecko engine, with lots of work on additional standards support and performance.
In my opinion, IE7 usability has successfully emulated and surpassed FireFox
Opera is even faster at JavaScript and page rendering, but Opera’s JavaScript support is quite buggy.
I’ve taken a quick look at your postings, which are very interesting. Lots of material and ideas! Congrats on being so focused!
Well, I gave IE 7 a try and it was frustratingly slow. As you indicated it is clearly slower than FF, but I have to say it feel slower than IE6 too. The features are going in the right direction, but without performance IE can’t compete with FF on my desktop. I hope the IE team is working on turbo boosting it.
As to the usability taikauuu mentioned, performance trumps cool buttons anyday for me and contributes far more to usability.
Hi, my vote is for Firefox.
Because IE7 works slow on my computer. Intel centrino T1350.
I don’t have any problem with internet browsing, since firefox can emulate IE on its window(if necessary), even for windows update.
But the IE software works slowly on my computer. When I click IE7 it takes some time to open and when I click for another tab, it says ‘connecting’ –Btw, where is it connecting ?– and waits for some seconds around 5 secs, I’d prefer it giving me an empty page before connecting anywhere to ask ‘Shall I give him an empty page ?’, thus without any delay as in firefox.
I usually read Rss feeds in firefox with one click, thus opening around 20 tabs. Of course it takes time to open all at once. But when all opened i can easily navigate between them almost instantly, but IE7 also waits for some seconds when I click another tab.
On both my computers, IE7 is also half as slow as FF, which means that it’s twice as performant as FF.