Gee's Blog World: 4-way HTML5 speed test: Firefox 3.7 faster than Internet Explorer 9 (video)

Monday, June 28, 2010

4-way HTML5 speed test: Firefox 3.7 faster than Internet Explorer 9 (video)

Filed under: Windows, Google, Mozilla, web 2.0, Browsers

Following on from last night's IE9 vs. Chrome 6 comparison, I've now pitched all four of the major Windows-based browsers against each other. On the same computer! At the same time! (God bless technology.)

As you will see from the video, Chrome (even with hardware acceleration turned on via command line switches) is in a distant last place, miles behind both Firefox and IE. Opera competes well up to a point, but eventually gives way to Firefox and IE with 1000 fishies swimming about.

I state in the video that Opera is hardware accelerated, but I could be wrong (we've confirmed that they have hardware acceleration devs on staff, but don't know what's under Opera's hood just yet). Chrome also performs very poorly, even though it (apparently) has hardware acceleration. Incidentally, if you want to turn on hardware acceleration in Firefox 3.7, follow this guide.

Both Firefox and IE9 use Direct2D to utilize the GPU's rendering power -- so it's probably no surprise that they both show very similar results. It's most apparent when comparing CPU use; IE9 and FF3.7 are both miles ahead in performance, but both show the lowest CPU utilization!

Still, I'm certain Chrome will feature full hardware acceleration soon enough. The thing I'm most interested in is whether we'll see cross-platform hardware acceleration. Direct2D doesn't exist on either Mac or Linux -- so we'll see how it pans out! Meanwhile, if anyone wants to pit Opera or Chrome against Firefox on Linux, I'd be very interested to see the results.