Christian Stockwell: In the past few months, each of the browser makers has made very similar claims around their performance: “Superior speed and performance”, “The fastest and most powerful Web browser available”, and “The fastest web browser on any platform.” In some fundamental way, I think the likeness of these statements is a by-product of the complexity inherent in performance measurement and analysis.
Rather than join the chorus and trumpet IE as the fastest browser in the universe, this post is my attempt to demystify the performance work that is being delivered as part of IE8 so that you can understand how we are making you more productive.
Best of all, you don’t need to take my word for it. As Dean mentioned back at MIX08, Google has commented on our IE8 Beta 1 improvements (emphasis mine), and we’ve made IE8 even faster since then:
“Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to 2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7.”