The browser landscape is quite crowded and is full of competitors from nearly every major technology company on the market. When it comes to selecting a browser for your needs, selecting the right one can be a bit difficult as they all offer compelling features.
The test was conducted by Strangeloop, a company who measures website performance, and they came to the conclusion that IE10 is the fastest browser on the market. The 14 page report contains the results of a study of the top 2,000 retail websites, as ranked by Alexa.com. Each site was tested using a tool called WebPagetest – an open-source project primarily developed and supported by Google -- which simulates page load times from a real user’s perspective across current browsers: Chrome 20, Firefox 13, and Internet Explorer 7 through 10.
The end result is that IE10 was 8% faster than Chrome 20 but overall, pages were loading 9% slower when compared to the 2011 report. This is likely because webpages are becoming more complex and with a more robust feature set, comes slower loading times. IE10 was slightly faster than Firefox 13 too with IE10 average load time taking 6.392 seconds, Firefox at 6.395 seconds and Chrome 20 at 6.906 seconds.
Microsoft is certainly happy with the result of IE 10 at the top of the chart and had this to say:
We are thrilled Strangeloop Networks’ recent report validates IE10 delivers the best real world site performance, surpassing all other modern browsers. Real world performance is the most important factor in evaluating browsers and something that has been a focus for the IE team forsome time. Measuring browser speed only with milliseconds in web micro-benchmarks is simply not a good indicator of the performance a user will experience when they browse the web. Many factors matter, including page load time of real world sites, which is why we are excited that IE10 delivers the fastest web experience for the world’s most popular sites according to Strangeloop Networks.
-Roger Capriotti, Director Internet Explorer
While Microsoft will surely be pleased with IE10 coming out on top with this report, there is one small problem. Currently IE10 is only available to those who have Windows 8 installed, which is a small minority and that IE10 has not yet been released on Windows 7. So, while the browser may be top of the charts right now, it is a very small minority who actually has access to this browser.
Source: Strangeloop