I keep on reading reviews that IE9 is blazing fast and there is no difference between FF, Chrome, Opera. Other reviews complain about FF crawling.
I’m confused by all this because, for some reason, my experience is totally different and I’m trying to figure out why.
My PC specs are Win 7 64 bit, i7 CPU, 8g ram, 1gb gpu. I don’t run any add-ons or extensions, just the default.
I can see that IE9 is much faster than previous versions, and I used it exclusively for one week and it was fast but just feels slow at the end of the day. It’s hard to describe. I don’t know what it is. Has anyone experimented with this browser and figured it out? I don’t think it’s my PC, I also recently formatted and installed Windows fresh with all updates.
Contrary to what others say, FF seems fast to me, but Chrome and Opera feel slow like IE9.
I was hoping to make IE9 my primary and only browser.
What actual speed tests I ran on the various browsers showed Firefox to be the slowest with IE the second slowest. Opera was by far the fastest. I haven’t run those tests in a while so it may have been IE8 I was testing on rather than IE9 - I suppose I ought to run them again to see how the current versions of all the browsers compare.
You might want to scan for malware, there are lots of IE search hijacks and other attacks on IE only. I bounce between IE, Firefox an Chrome on a similar W7 machine and all three browsers have fairly similar speed. Chrome renders pages a bit faster I thing but not a significant difference.
The testing I did ran the same JavaScript code in a loop a million times for each browser and the differences were still only measured in fractions of a second that were too small to actually notice. That was the difference between super fast Opera and dead slow Firefox. IE was just barely slower than Safari and Chrome in that test. So with regular processing any real speed differences between the browsers are going to be measured in fractions of a Millisecond- way too small for a person to detect.
I don’t think it’s malware because I installed Windows.
The latest IE is version 9, it is definitely faster than version 8 and has some neat features like taskbar pinning and customizing your site as an “app”.
I don’t mean the speed of javascript or rendering, I think they are all pretty much equal in current versions, but with IE9 it just feels slow when working with it.
After trying to compare it side by side with FF and Opera it appears to scroll a bit slower and also when you copy things it also takes it as formatted text so probably these things make it appear slow.
Oh well, I guess back to running multiple browsers. I just wish some developers stop developing IE-only sites.
“IE only” is generally only used now for intranets.
IE9 supports all the same things as other modern browsers and with so few people now actually using IE it would be completely stupid for anyone to actually produce an IE only web site now as they are really limiting their audience. Just about every IE only web site has alternatives that work for any browser so that everyone else can avoid the IE only site and still access all the info.
Of course the integration of IE9 into the operating system still means that IE9 is potentially less secure than the alternatives.
You’d be surprised. I’ve come across sites that prevent you accessing the website. For example, recently I had to access the FAFSA website, and was blocked using Firefox because I wasn’t using a “standard” browser. This wasn’t five years ago, it was a few weeks ago.
Also I don’t think few people use IE. The market share is still the highest although it is dropping it is still the top (unfortunately).
Go into Internet Settings in IE, go to the Advance Tab, the first setting, “Use software rendering” is it checked or unchecked? Try toggling the option and testing see if it changes the results.
With IE at about 32.9% in first place followed by Firefox at 32.9% in second place and Chrome at 24.3% in third place (and growing rapidly) it will probably only be a few more months before Chrome dominates the browser market the way that IE6 used to.
If you ignore the IE4 and earlier users then Firefox would be leading according to those particular stats. Of course the stats may be different for sites that don’t have so many IE specific pages on them as the one I got those figures from.
Anyway, you can always change the useragent of any web browser so that it identifies itself as Internet Explorer 999 which will get you around most of the stupid sites that only recognise IE (and if you assume the stats for IE999 are actually using other browsers just masking them as IE then IE is no longer leading either - of course then there are all the people masking their modern browser as IE6,7,8 or 9 who quite possibly make up a substantial portion of the rest - hey maybe no one uses IE any more at all and it is just 32.9% of people using other browsers pretending to be IE to get around the moronic web sites that try to test what browser it is).
I guess steve is right. Having a lots of tools, software and so many accessories in your web browser can affect its performance, it will surely get slower function. You must take the suggestion of steve.
At Netmarketshare the %'s are IE 54.39%, FF 22.46%, Chrome 16.2%, Safari 5.02% and then there are the “also rans”.
I use IE9 as my default browser on most occassions and I don’t notice any significant difference in speed between IE9, FF7 and the latest versions of Opera, Safari, and Chrome which I also have on my pc. But then I just have the default installations of each browser running.
IE is the web developer’s bane at the moment - website all working but a check in IE… Chrome while it’s good, I actually find it buggy; and this is on a number of different platforms. They’re still work on it.
Firefox to me is the fastest and has tons of great extensions which make browsing and working on the web much better.
Don’t believe in any IE hype. The only reason I use them is to check how something looks in IE but otherwise find them very slow and buggy.
I code in validated xhtml and validated css and very rarely have any issues with IE7+ and any issues that have come up have been minor, mainly cosmetic and easy to fix or work around without having to use invalid html or css.
I found checking Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering in the Advanced Tab of Internet Options could be an improvement. Internet Explorer seems to work this out for itself though.