Back in April I wrote an entry complaining about IE’s performance as a Web 2.0 platform:
“From a Web 2.0 application developers perspective (developers who use a lot of JavaScript and DOM manipulation), IE 6 is plagued by a number of well known problems such as its ability to readily leak memory. Regrettably, Microsoft’s next release of Internet Explorer, IE 7, does little to resolve these issues.”
I am happy to say that I was wrong.
Microsoft’s IE team has clearly been hard at work on improving their browser’s memory management and JavaScript performance. IE 7 has made some significant leaps forward based on some initial in house testing here at Zimbra. We are in general observing about a 2x performance improvement with IE 7 vs IE 6 when using the Zimbra Web Client (ZWC).
As is well documented, IE 6 is notoriously bad at leaking memory, particularly due to circular references that include COM objects. The good news is that our tests indicate that this problem has been solved in IE 7. While in our test profile, it appears to consume more memory than Firefox, IE 7 seems to have solved the horrendous memory leaks exhibited in IE 6.
We also looked at the performance of Firefox, IE 6, and IE 7 over a set of common ZWC operations such as logging in, viewing messages, navigating around various folders, viewing contacts, and performing various calendar operations. The graph below shows the relative performance of each browser against the other:
Again we see that across just about every operation, IE 7 performs better than IE 6; however, for the most part Firefox still beats out IE 7. When we looked at the sum total time it takes for all operations to be performed (admittedly a coarse grained metric), we noticed that IE 7 was about twice as fast as IE 6; however, Firefox was more than twice as fast as IE 7 and about four times faster than IE 6.
In conclusion, IE 7 has made some quite significant improvements over IE 6, both in terms of performance and memory management; however, there is still room to improve - particularly against Firefox, a challenge I hope the IE team will be taking up.
on October 19th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Thanks for the insight. Very useful information. Do you have any indication of how Firefox 2 performs compared to this?
I installed FF 2.0 RC3 today and working in pages such as GMail and Netvibes has significant less memory leaks compared to FF 1.5.
(At least that’s what the Leak Monitor extension plugin tells me)
So, I’d like to see your chart updated with Firefox 2.
on October 20th, 2006 at 7:59 am
IE 7 Benchmarking
Zimbra has benchmarked IE7 and found some big improvements. I am seeing similar things on QEDWiki: IE 7 is much more performant in heavy “Ajax” situations, though it lags behind Mozilla. Firefox 2 (Mozilla 1.8.1) seems to be a bit…
on October 20th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Is there any way to get a copy of this benchmark? I’d like to try it on Safari.
on October 21st, 2006 at 10:07 am
IE7 的效率
在 Ajaxian 看到利用 Zimbra Web Client 測試 IE7 跑 JavaScript 的速度：IE7: Twice as performant as IE6, but half as slow as FF 1.5，原文在 IE 7 vs IE 6 這篇，雖然標題只說 IE7 與 IE6，不過實際上在測試的時候也把 Fire…
on October 22nd, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Have you also tested rendering speeds? Visually, IE7 still seems to perform smoother in animations and redrawing than Gecko.
on October 23rd, 2006 at 7:01 am
Great stuff - my own testing using FF 2.0 RC3 shows a huge increase over FF 1.5.x (mostly due to memory leak error conditions being fixed in FF 2.0 is my guess).
Just for a laugh, have you bothered to test responces on Windows versus Linux (or Apple?).
on October 23rd, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Thanks for the great (quantitative) information, guys — always informative. I’d love to see the repeat of the tests with the release of FF2.0 also.
I’m curious, as a general aside question, what platform are you guys using for your tests?… JSUnit by chance?
on October 23rd, 2006 at 4:46 pm
@Maciej
Thanks for the post. This benchmark was done with QTP (Quick Test Pro) and today only supports IE and Firefox on Windows. We are looking at porting this test to Selenium which would let us run it on a wider set of browsers and OS platforms.
on October 24th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
nice test, but still i can’t understand not featuring opera as lots of articles forget in their IE7 review.
Okay this browser sometime needs to mask as firefox to be allowed to use ajax website (as googles services) and so disappear of web statistics.
But concerning speed and usage on low end PC, pfiou, or real usage with 10 web pages open and more….
on October 25th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
Firefox 2 vs IE 7
Last week I posted an entry comparing IE 7 with Firefox 1.5 and the venerable IE 6. Lot’s of folks have since asked for Firefox 2 to be added to the mix. The reason we didn’t initially include Firefox 2…
on November 6th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
I still think ie7 is junk. Since I put ie7 on my computer, I have not been able to print e-mails. I get a script error message everytime.
I was on tech support for hours Saturday night but the problem was not solved. I am going to try firefox.
on November 21st, 2006 at 6:42 am
I agree, ie7 is nowhere near where it should be. Beyond being slow, I get all sorts of exceptions in various dlls whenever I close ie7. I do tend to use it a lot with Sharepoint, so perhaps it has problems with the various ActiveX controls.
Still, I hope the MS team is actively working on performance and bug fixes, because right now it’s not usable as a browser!
on December 7th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Did you guys use QTP for testing AJAX application? If yes, could you automate drag and drop testing?
on January 5th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Yes, we use QTP to test Zimbra including drag-drop and across IE 6, IE 7 and FF
on April 10th, 2007 at 12:00 am
I still use Internet Explorer 6 I find it to be more stable with websites and faster on my Celeron machine.
on July 26th, 2007 at 9:02 am
i m facing prob with IE6 and IE7 i developed one JSF application using ADF in IE6 webpage is displaying correctly but in IE7 in half of the page webpage is displaying wat is the prob and how to solve the problem can any one help me
thanks
Harish
on August 11th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I am using ie6 still because ie7 has some problem about security I am waiting microsoft for safe ie7
Owner: picbros
http://www.picbros.com
I want to write a page from my site for ie comparing
http://www.picbros.com/ie6_vs_ie7.html
on August 31st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
RRao, How do you get quick test pro to wait for the DOM to be changed by an ajax response before continuing using Quick Test Pro?? Thanks!
on December 27th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
sup everyone i i WAS using internet explorer 7 but it was lagging the tabs took so long to load
and it froze my computer half the time. For you people still using internet explorer 7 get 6 its on xp, a well trusted os.Get internet explorer 6 with windows xp sp3beta or sp2 or wait for the official release for sp3.(sp3 is service pack 3)
or firefox 2.0.0.11
ps dont get mozilla firefox 3 beta its BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!