Internet Explorer 9 RC Review (Performance)
Before we get on with the benchmarks, we must say that we are generally very impressed with the way Internet Explorer 9 performs. The biggest reason for this is speed, which is on par with the best that the other browsers have to offer. Even scrolling is smooth, thanks to the hardware acceleration, which reduces the strain on the CPU. Those coming from an older version of Internet Explorer will be greatly impressed with how much it has progressed over the years.
We did face some trouble with certain websites, where the content wasn't displayed in the correct order. We also had severe issues when working with the CMS of our website, which we never faced with other browsers. At times websites used to stop responding and this was a recurring problem with some of them. Because of these things we were vary of using the browser for doing important stuff, such as online shopping, in case things don't work out well. Some of the issues were just bugs, which would no doubt get sorted out in the final version. Others felt more like something that will continue to stay for a while.
Internet Explorer 9 uses DirectWrite for rendering the text using hardware acceleration. The text looks slightly different than it did in previous versions of Internet Explorer or in other browsers. It s a lot smoother than, say, that in Firefox 3, Opera or Chrome but not as much as in Safari. Also, it only works well with larger fonts, which look really nice but makes smaller fonts look fuzzy, unlike in Safari. The upcoming Firefox 4 suffers from a similar problem, although it is much worse in its case.
As you can see in the benchmarks below, Internet Explorer 9 also came last in most of the benchmarks that we performed. The most surprising one of the lot was the HTML5 Test, in which Internet Explorer 9 performed quite poorly, despite Microsoft boasting otherwise. We compared it against the latest stable versions of all the other major browsers. We wanted to include Firefox 4 but for some reason it wasn't working so well and was stuttering badly, so we had to remove it from the test. Internet Explorer 8 failed to work with many of the tests, so we had to remove that as well.
The benchmarks were run on an Asus G73Jw Notebook, running on a 1.73GHz Intel Core i7 Q740 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M GPU, 8GB RAM and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit.
Published by: Rikoshay - Published on :
27 Feb 2011
We did face some trouble with certain websites, where the content wasn't displayed in the correct order. We also had severe issues when working with the CMS of our website, which we never faced with other browsers. At times websites used to stop responding and this was a recurring problem with some of them. Because of these things we were vary of using the browser for doing important stuff, such as online shopping, in case things don't work out well. Some of the issues were just bugs, which would no doubt get sorted out in the final version. Others felt more like something that will continue to stay for a while.
Internet Explorer 9 uses DirectWrite for rendering the text using hardware acceleration. The text looks slightly different than it did in previous versions of Internet Explorer or in other browsers. It s a lot smoother than, say, that in Firefox 3, Opera or Chrome but not as much as in Safari. Also, it only works well with larger fonts, which look really nice but makes smaller fonts look fuzzy, unlike in Safari. The upcoming Firefox 4 suffers from a similar problem, although it is much worse in its case.
As you can see in the benchmarks below, Internet Explorer 9 also came last in most of the benchmarks that we performed. The most surprising one of the lot was the HTML5 Test, in which Internet Explorer 9 performed quite poorly, despite Microsoft boasting otherwise. We compared it against the latest stable versions of all the other major browsers. We wanted to include Firefox 4 but for some reason it wasn't working so well and was stuttering badly, so we had to remove it from the test. Internet Explorer 8 failed to work with many of the tests, so we had to remove that as well.
The benchmarks were run on an Asus G73Jw Notebook, running on a 1.73GHz Intel Core i7 Q740 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M GPU, 8GB RAM and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit.
Peacekeeper Scores (Higher values are better)
Sunspider Scores (Lower values are better)
V8 Benchmark Suite (Higher values are better)
Kraken JavaScript Benchmark (lower values are better)
HTML5test.com Scores (Higher values are better)
