Previously we had benchmarked Internet Explorer 10, found in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, against stable and current versions of browsers from other vendors. Now we have taken the same tests as last time, added some more, and benchmarked Internet Explorer 10 Consumer Preview against the beta versions of major browsers.
All tests conducted here were done one at a time on the same PC running Windows 8 Consumer Preview (build 8250) x64, with fresh installations of the browser and no other applications running or tabs open. Benchmarks were conducted more than twice and averaged.
To clarify: default settings were used across all browsers to ensure an even playing field. As some commenters have noticed, lower-than-expected scores were obtained in some tests from browsers that have hardware acceleration disabled by default. We did not enable this setting if it was disabled because an end-user would not know to enable this when trying the browser, and would luck out in terms of performance gains.
Benchmarked browsers: Internet Explorer 10 Consumer Preview Desktop and Metro (10.0.8250.0), Chrome 18 beta (18.0.1025.45), Firefox 11 beta 5 and Opera Next 12.00 alpha.
Sunspider (in ms, lower is better)
As most people know, Sunspider tests the JavaScript performance of a browser
Mozilla Kraken (in ms, lower is better)
Kraken is an alternative JavaScript test made by Mozilla. As this benchmark is designed by the maker of Firefox, the results may be swayed in Firefox"s favor.
V8 Benchmark (higher is better)
V8 is another JavaScript benchmark, which is used to tune the V8 JS engine used in Chrome. As such, results may be swayed in Chrome"s favor
Peacekeeper (higher is better)
This benchmark shows the all-round capabilities of the browser
HTML5 Test (out of 475)
The HTML5 test awards the browser a score out of 475 that reflects how much support for HTML5 the browser has
Particle Accelerator (frames per second, higher is better)
This is a HTML5 graphics test (which we did at 1920 x 1080) that is part of Microsoft"s IE10 Test Drive suite. As such, results may favor Internet Explorer.
GUIMark2 HTML5 Tests (frames per second, higher is better)
This is a real-world HTML5 test that measures the performance of the browser performing various HTML5 tasks. There is also a Flash version of the same set of benchmarks.
Fishbowl (in FPS, higher is better)
This benchmark is made by Microsoft to show the HTML5 animation capabilities of Internet Explorer 10, and as such, results may favor Internet Explorer. We did this benchmark with 500 and 2000 fish at 1920x1080
View some of these benchmarks with stable browsers against Internet Explorer 10 here.