

Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in - monkeygrinder
http://news.techworld.com/networking/3202572/internet-explorer-8-runs-ten-times-faster-with-google-chrome-plug-in/

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tjic
If I had to rank-order the various humiliations I've seen, this comes near the
top.

Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it
took us 14 years to get here".

Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release
it as a _patch_ to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved
your best effort by 10x".

Ouch!

~~~
lamby
This is misleading. Webkit, the core component of Chrome, has been worked on
for far more than 2 years.

~~~
nixme
Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years
old.

~~~
nostrademons
True, but the guy who did V8 is the same guy who did Beta, Self, and HotSpot.
That's like 20 years of experience in writing high-performance VMs for dynamic
languages right there.

~~~
apr
Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.

~~~
andreyf
"Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make
a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money
off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace.

So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to _slow
down_ JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling
desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which
have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers
that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with
features like _security_ and _easy maintainability_.

~~~
davepeck
Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I
guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their
browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It
makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve
the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.

~~~
andreyf
_I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster,_

Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2
months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in
the past couple of decades :-P

1\. Scroll to "How We Did It", here:
[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html)

~~~
davepeck
It is incorrect to conclude that Microsoft's lack of achievement in X implies
(1) its lack of ambition for improving X, or (2) [as ancestor suggested] its
determination to sabotage X.

Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?

Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on
IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably
spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font
format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release
to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level --
requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There
are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.

I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.

~~~
bad_user
Look, apologies for their behavior aren't enough.

I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling
us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox
became a credible threat.

This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about
preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's
their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for
them lightly.

They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their
competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top
of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But
they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.

~~~
davepeck
> They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a
> credible threat.

This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what
goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in
my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-
staffed, heavily armed, etc.

I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having
previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE
team is back. There are, however, _explanations_... ones which hopefully help
to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser
back. The truth is much more mundane.

------
icey
On one hand, I think this is pretty funny.

On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google
really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're _willing_
to flex).

It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it
considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft
will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start getting a
little worried.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Worried? Are you kidding?

I would _love_ to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the
opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they
do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of
mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users.

But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of
you even once, you've just dramatically decreased your odds of winning, and
they have an awful lot of smart people working for them. You'd have to be more
nimble, and you'd have to be able to guess at what they were going to do
before they did it ... and then you'd have to do it better, and do it before
they do.

Beating Microsoft is like playing chess in the park. Beating Google ... that's
like playing speed chess with Big Blue. It would be a blast.

~~~
icefox
I hack on Arora a cross platform WebKit based web browser. And your right, I
am having a blast. I have even contributed to Chromium so I know what I am up
against :) Knowing that they have a team of really smart people working full
time and Arora is a few devs in their free time really does make me think
about what is important.

I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock,
Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D

~~~
natrius
Have you considered how blocking ads is bad for the way online services are
currently monetized? I'd rather have advertisers pay for my services than have
to pay for it directly. If you don't like that trade-off, why not ask sites
you use to offer an ad-free paid version? It sounds like you're trying to get
the best of both worlds, and it isn't sustainable.

~~~
icefox
It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point.
AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest
feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort
AdBlock was a winner.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap.

I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory
issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that
for a lot of people is a killer feature.

I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that
AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more
advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and
other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and
malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to
over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a
better way to do it.

So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.

~~~
natrius
Passive AdBlock use is a very implicit, inconsiderate way of telling people to
get a new business model. How about, "Hey, the ads on your site are annoying,
and I think I almost got a virus from one. I suggest you fix it. In the
meantime, I'm using AdBlock on your site."

There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a
brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or
charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If
you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know
why and how to get you to stop.

------
josefresco
Anyone have real-life applications of this benchmark? Similar to 3D-gaming and
CPU/GPU benchmarking in general the results (and winners) depend highly on the
parameters of the test. Although at the end of the day nothing matters except
real world performance.

Can someone point to an application where this performance improvement can be
demonstrated?

~~~
ars
Gmail, google docs, pretty much any heavy javascript based site.

------
miracle
It's only logical to conclude that Chrome standalone must run at least 8 times
faster than Internet Explorer 8? Otherwise their gui would be much slower.

Why wasn't there a post about this before? This post must be complete
bullshit.

------
markm
Using Moore's law does that mean Google's development is approximately 6 years
ahead of MS?

(8 times faster code doubles the speed once, doubles the speed twice, and
doubles the speed a third time.)

~~~
mquander
Moore's law works backwards with software. Google's development is 6 years
_behind_ MS.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I believe you're thinking of Zawinski's Law.

------
mattmaroon
Not really very relevant. Anyone who knows what a benchmark is is already
running something other than IE. And who would install a Chrome plugin for IE
when they could just as easily use Chrome?

~~~
dhs
Maybe users who must use IE because of the policies of their company?

~~~
jimmybot
But if that's the case, isn't that likely because they have internal
applications that are IE only? It seems more like a marketing thing--Overcome
people's inhibitions by letting them feel like they "only" installed a plugin
and are still running IE.

~~~
tjogin
Only websites with a specific meta-tag set are going to use the Chrome
rendering engine, every other site will render using the default IE-rendering
engine, including any internal IE-only applications.

Also, although it is hard to believe, some people actually think IE is a good
browser. I don't understand how or why, but some people actually do.

------
fishercs
there needs to be a way to force the rendering agent to be used, this would
make the plugin agent much more viable instead of having to call cf: in front
of a web address. I can see this being a good thing but also could be a bad
thing, this doesn't fix the browser vulnerabilities that are still out there,
merely your rendering engine. I would hate for people to be misled into
thinking their version of internet explorer 6 is the latest and greatest
because of the chrome rendering agent.

------
prakash
This is not good news. IE is going to stick around a lot longer now -- sigh!

~~~
noodle
no, this is somewhat good news. IE was going to stick around for a long time
anyways, because its the default windows browser and there will always be
people who don't know better than to use the default.

this will just hasten the migration away. its probably not a huge win for
anyone with respect to directly converting it into migrations to another
browser, because the people who were clueless about switching probably still
will be.

its just a really nice selling point when you have the ear of someone, trying
to convert them.

------
elblanco
~~~cold hearted~~~

------
tybris
I didn't think anyone would have the patience to make this comparison.

------
seshagiric
Without knowing what site was used in the testing and in what manner
(rendering speed, javascript speed, xml parsing speed ??) is the chrome plugin
8 times faster, I would rather keep my fingers crossed.

~~~
ars
If you had read the article, you would know.

They tested using the SunSpider javascript benchmark:
<http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html>

