April 2, 2008 by
ryan
After reading Steve Souders' article on IE8 speed enhancements, I became curious about how page download times in IE8 stacked up against the latest beta of Firefox (3.0b5). I realize that both of these browsers are in beta so the release product may be signficantly different. Also, please keep in mind these results are not very scientific (obviously). To obtain download times, I used Fiddler for Internet Explorer and Firebug for Firefox.
First off, I loaded a several higher volume websites to compare page download times. Each page was loaded three times (for extreme statistical accuracy :P) and the average load time was calculated.
Google News
http://news.google.com
0 Javascript Requests - 0 CSS Requests - 32 Images
| Firefox: |
1.08 Seconds |
| IE8: |
2.43 Seconds |
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com
12 Javascript Requests - 2 CSS Requests - 96 Images
| Firefox: |
5.59 Seconds |
| IE8: |
4.86 Seconds |
Mac.com
http://www.mac.com
15 Javascript Requests - 6 CSS Requests - 44 Images
| Firefox: |
5.74 Seconds |
| IE8: |
4.52 Seconds |
Finally, I ran Steve Souders' Parellel downloads test; the results were almost identical.
| Firefox |
 |
| Internet Explorer |
 |
It was really odd to me that Google News loaded almost two times as fast on Firefox while all the other sites loaded close to the same speed or slightly faster on Internet Explorer. The only difference I notice off the bat is the number of JS/CSS files; maybe its something to do with that? It would be very interesting to see how the browsers compare when rendering pages. Have you found results similar to this or know of a good way to test render time? Let me know what you think.
