PCWorld - Microsoft's newest browser promises faster page load speeds. Does IE 8 deliver? We put it to the test against the latest version of Firefox.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is here at last--the newest entry into the ongoing browser wars. Microsoft packed a healthy number of new features into IE 8, and made security a top priority in its newest version of this venerable Web browser.
But just as important as all that is browsing speed--that is, how quickly can IE 8 render your favorite Web sites? To get an idea of how IE 8 compares, we put it to the test.
Our Speed-Test Methodology
Artwork: Chip Taylor
In our browser speed comparison, we pitted a near-final build of Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox 3.0.7, the current non-beta version of Mozilla's browser. We used a set of nine popular Web sites in our testing: Amazon, MySpace, Yahoo, PC World, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Wikipedia. To ensure we could gather as accurate page-loading times as possible, we recorded our testing sessions for review later on.
We loaded each site ten times in each of the browsers and repeated the process the following day to rule out any network traffic or server issues. Prior to each test run, we cleared the browsers' caches as well. We also repeated the load tests to ensure that we had sufficient data to identify loading speed trends. To ensure consistent results, we performed testing on a fresh Windows Vista installation, and we reinstalled the operating system before each round of testing. Additionally, we removed the two best and two worst scores for each page load test to produce more consistent results.
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