Internet Explorer is faster than Firefox

A differnet measure of speed...

[me_lukas]

It's true.

Firefox (1.0PR) is the slowest, Opera (7.54) is a bit quicker, and IE (6.0.2800, all update exc. SP2) is the fastest.

I'm not talking about load times (which depend a lot more on your and the servers internet connection than the browser for most people on <1M), which the others excel at, but displaying, specifically scrolling pages.

The effect is best seen on pages with CSS static backgrounds. Go here:

[csszengarden.com...]

in Firefox and Opera, scrolling is jerky, its like the scroll bar's in treacle. In IE it zips along.

Has anyone else found this? I'm no Microsoft luvvie but why all the hype about Firefox's speed but why no mention of this?

[MatthewHSE]

First of all...

Welcome to Webmaster World!

To address your question, I don't notice a difference between IE and FireFox on my computer. And FireFox sure renders it faster!

1.91 Ghz. processor, 512MB memory, W2K SP4.

[pete_m]

I get the opposite results to you me_lukas - IE is definitely slower than Firefox for scrolling on that page.

(Pentium-M 1.5GHz, Radeon 9600, 512MB, XP SP2)

[bunltd]

To address your question, I don't notice a difference between IE and FireFox on my computer. And FireFox sure renders it faster!

I don't notice a difference in scrolling either, and FireFox does render much faster.

3GHz P4 - 1GB - XP

LisaB

[Lance]

No difference here either.

P4 3Ghz, 1GB, Nvidia Ti4200, XP-Pro SP2

FF renders much faster though

[edited by: Lance at 3:27 pm (utc) on Oct. 29, 2004]

[encyclo]

It's a low memory thing: IE requires less RAM to run than either Opera or Firefox. On faster machines, the effect is not too noticeable.

The page you mention is rather jerky when scrolling in both Opera and Firefox on my main machine (500MHz Celeron with 128Mb RAM, running Linux), and it is faster in IE6 on a comparable machine running Windows XP.

[ogletree]

There is no difference here in schrolling but ff loaded it faster.

[kaled]

I use all three browsers, sometimes all open simultaneously. In general, I see little to choose between them for speed. Opera claims to be the fastest browser on Earth - I've never seen it myself.

Kaled.

[StupidScript]

For me (Win98SE, 128MB, P2@600MHz), this is the order in which my browsers rendered the page (fastest first):

Opera 5.14
Firefox 1.0 SC1
MSIE 6.0.2800.1106
Netscape 7.02

The only browser that jerked the scrolling was Netscape, the others were quite smooth.

For those of you still using the original PR release of Firefox, be sure to get the latest version (SC1).

Comparing a preview release of a piece of software against software that has had years to work out bugs is like comparing the baseball pitching arm of a Little Leaguer to that of a Major League professional. Of course the kid isn't as developed as the old man, but the fact that it's even close is remarkable.

[vkaryl]

Stupid Script, do you have a link to that update for FF? That has to be the least useful, hardest to navigate site I've run across lately....

[encyclo]

Unless you're into debugging the final Firefox pre-release, don't bother downloading it - 1.0 Final is due on November 9th, so the final testing version will only be around for 10 days unless there is a significant last-minute hitch. Mozilla is not pushing or advertizing this release for this very reason.

When the real Firefox 1.0 comes out, you won't need to navigate anywhere - you'll be able to download directly from the mozilla.org home page.

[edited by: encyclo at 12:51 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2004]

[keyplyr]

In my experience, IE renders CSS and images much faster than FF, however I still like FF's tabbed browsing and the web-developers tool bar add-on is absolutely the best!

[vkaryl]

Hmm. Okay, thanks encyclo.