IE vs. FireFox: Browser Speed

People are often shouting about how browser X is faster than browser Y. Peter Illes happened upon a test, and found that his setup showed a large performance improvement in FF over IE:

o decided to do some investigations and did profile the same task (switching from Basic into Expert) in both browsers on the same machine with the same conditions (only the two browsers loaded, average of 5 runs for each). Here are the results:

• Internet Explorer finished on average in 18.34 secs
• Firefox finished on average in 3.38 secs

Now, that IS a difference. In this test Firefox was faster by cca. 5.42 times.

If you want to take a look at the results first hand, you can do it by going to this page of the Morfik Dev2Dev Labs and either running the Mine Sweeper app from there (View MineSweeper xApp) or downloading the source code and running it locally (it is pre-compiled in the archive).

Of course, you can hardly make any conclusions from this alone.