IE9 vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera Performance

Internet Explorer 8 and lower showed the world that a browser can have poor underlying javascript execution engines, lack of Modern web support (HTML5, CSS3) and poor threads that render webpages sluggishly for most users.

But it’s time to change it all. Microsoft has built the new browser ground up and lead innovation to let the industry to follow. IE9 is the First browser to support full GPU acceleration (Direct 2D) Rendering which means your graphics card is now put to good use. Earlier to this Firefox 3.7 nightly showed some GPU rendering which is pretty limited.

Our early impressions of IE9 were good, but it has gone better.

Rendering the web page in most browsers including IE8 is performed on the CPU. Direct2D (a new Windows API in Windows 7) uses hardware Direct3D acceleration to accelerate 2D graphics. This would be available as a patch for Windows Vista. Through the use of Direct2D, IE9 performs all graphics rendering on the GPU, providing quicker page rendering, faster, smoother animation, and high quality image scaling, resulting in richer experience.

Download IE9

Performance Benchmark

The New engine used sounds exactly like V8 engine used in Chrome. On the Inside, the new IE9 JavaScript engine will compile JavaScript into native code, just like in V8, and the technique it will use to speed up the object-oriented nature of JavaScript also sounded similar to the approach V8 takes.

We don’t go by the words of the manufacturer, we like to test it on our own. Today Microsoft announced a Preview of IE9, we got our handson and reviewed it. We used SunSpider benchmark to get Real world-alike Javascript performance results and Some intense graphics Based applications like Bing maps, google Maps and some of the demos hosted by Microsoft itself.

SunSpider Benchmark

Results:  My eyes popped out, IE9 seems to have some great improvements:

Clearly, IE9 has come very close to Safari  and beats all versions of Firefox. It would be some time till it touches chrome’s mark (may be in the final version) but the results are brilliant so far.

Graphics Framerate (FPS)

Era of Rich graphics on web just started over last few years with beginning of Maps applications and some fantastic animations in various webapps. We took some of the most common ones: google Maps, Bing Maps and few demos hosted by Microsoft for IE9 and then average framerate over all of these and results were eye-opener:

IE9 sweeps of all browsers in this area. The GPU acceleration is way to mature than in Firefox 3.7. And Opera 10.5 does some decent job thanks to it’s Vega graphics and Carkan engines.

Update: IE9 vs. Chrome 10 vs. Firefox 4 Benchmarks - on Core i7 machine

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