IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5
via ajaxian: IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5
Ross Dargahi of Zimbra complained about IE 6 performance. Since IE 7 is here, he decided to retry his tests and see how Microsoft had done:
Microsoft’s IE team has clearly been hard at work on improving their browser’s memory management and JavaScript performance. IE 7 has made some significant leaps forward based on some initial in house testing here at Zimbra. We are in general observing about a 2x performance improvement with IE 7 vs IE 6 when using the Zimbra Web Client (ZWC).
As is well documented, IE 6 is notoriously bad at leaking memory, particularly due to circular references that include COM objects. The good news is that our tests indicate that this problem has been solved in IE 7. While in our test profile, it appears to consume more memory than Firefox, IE 7 seems to have solved the horrendous memory leaks exhibited in IE 6.
We also looked at the performance of Firefox, IE 6, and IE 7 over a set of common ZWC operations such as logging in, viewing messages, navigating around various folders, viewing contacts, and performing various calendar operations.
In conclusion, IE 7 has made some quite significant improvements over IE 6, both in terms of performance and memory management; however, there is still room to improve - particularly against Firefox, a challenge I hope the IE team will be taking up.
Half as slow?! C’mon, let’s get our grammar/wording straight… ‘Slow’ is a negative word, so we’ll call it -10. If IE7 is ‘half as slow’ as firefox, that would mean IT WAS FASTER! (such as, for example, Firefox being the full -10, but IE7 being ‘half as slow’, or -5, which would be faster.)
But, still, this is an interesting article, and thanks for posting. Looks like it’s actually *much* closer to ff1.5 than ‘half’-near it. Also makes me wonder how ff2 would fare in this test.
Dennis, while I find your comments regarding the grammar in this post entertaining, I’ll note that this is a re-post of an Ajaxian article, which I did not author…