Titans clash. IE8 beta 2 vs Firefox 3.0.1 vs Safari 3.1.2 vs Opera 9.52

September 1, 2008 · Filed under IT world, Opinion, Technology

You can call me troll, but I couldn’t resist it. Few days ago Microsoft released the 2nd beta of the new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Many years ago (”long time ago in a galaxy far away”) I stopped using Internet Explorer (IE), so it’s time to check this last preview of what is upon us.

The first test was about JavaScript performance. These days JavaScript “bloated” pages visit our browsers. They do many things like you can see in Google maps or Google mail. But, what about in those synthetic numbers? Here is the answer.

If we say that IE8 is the base speed: Firefox is 2.74 times faster, Safari is 2.24 times faster and Opera 1.90 times faster than IE8. If we add some the upcoming performance for Safari 4 and Firefox 3.1 of 7 times faster than firefox 3.0 then we have that the new safari and firefox are gonna be arround 14 times faster than IE8.

Apart from the technical numbers. IE8 is as IE7 was when it was a beta. The old hacks for IE7 don’t work unless IE8 works in IE7 emulation mode (more hacks for this). Also, pages in standards mode don’t work as expected even if it passes the Acid 2 test. Is strange to see Firefox, Safari and Opera rendering the same site and producing the same results. However, IE8 Acid2 compliant just does strange things. This means more hacks for IE8 (thank you Microsoft, Web Developers are going to love you so much).

Are you thinking about moving to IE8? WARNING TOTALLY BIASED!

If you’re willing to do the change, just download anything else. My personal recommendation is Firefox but whatever else is better.

If you’re using IE6 or IE7 for your normal web browsing and you think you’re gonna go along with the new version, spend your efforts on anything else. You’ll enjoy faster browsing and many other options if you don’t use IE. And over all of these, you’ll save web developers from writing IE hacks.

“Save the web, ignore Internet Explorer”.

Some links to save the web:

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2 Responses so far »

  1. 1

    Rodrigo Gabriel said,

    2008-09-14 @ 8.07 pm

    Era de Firefox hasta que le puse los cuernos esta semana con el Google Chrome… Me atrevería a decir que carga las páginas igual o más rápido que el Firefox 3 y además aún no lo he colgado y se inicia infinitamente más rápido que cualquiera de los otros 3 (sin contar con el IE7, que, evidentemente, no cuenta). Ahora tengo Firefox y Safari para “por si acaso”.

  2. 2

    Το φιτρί αγόρι » A new Titan was late: Google Chrome said,

    2008-09-22 @ 6.33 pm

    [...] Google chrome. But, of course, they added the google spicy touch. It’s not fair to leave my last post about browsers without Google chrome’s [...]

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