Is IE8 faster than Firefox and Chrome? Hmmm ...

Microsoft has published a document that explains how to properly conduct tests for browser performance. This document also contains a table comparing the performance of the three browsers (Chrome 1.0, Firefox 3.05 and Internet Explorer 8). According to her, IE8 runs faster with more sites out of the 25 most popular (according to comScore ) than Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome.

Here is the table:

Of the 25 sites listed, IE8 is faster at 12 , while Chrome wins at 9 , and Firefox 3.0.5 only with 4. But how can such test results be combined with the fact that Firefox and Chrome faster than IE8?

Well, I can not say anything against the way of testing (which seems to be quite encompassing). But I think the selection of pages for testing was rather poor. Does the Google homepage have a lot of work for the browser? And on Yahoo ?! Wikipedia? Of course, these pages are popular, very popular, but most of them are very highly optimized. I would like to see browser comparisons on Google search results pages, on the pages of long Wikipedia articles, on the page of the catalog in the Apple Store ...

So, while I like the way of testing, I think that the choice of sites does not reflect the real user behavior. Also, my experience with different browsers suggests that IE is not very fast for normal networking.