For the past two years, Google Chrome has led the way in browser JavaScript speed, with the occasional temporary takeover by Safari or Opera. During this time Microsoft’s market-leading browser, Internet Explorer, has significantly trailed in this one performance indicator, but today, the tables have turned in favor of the Redmond, Washingon software giant.
According to the company, with the release of the seventh Platform Preview, IE9 now outperforms all other browsers in JavaScript speed.
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Platform preview releases are separate from the IE9 Beta, which is intended for public consumption. The previews are released so that developers can test their code and offer feedback on the upcoming software’s underlying engine. Microsoft launched the first Platform Preview last March at its MIX10 Web developer conference. The public beta is not being updated with the new JavaScript engine today, since its larger audience requires a higher level of stability, refinement, and testing.
I spoke with Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE, and Rob Mauceri, principle group program manager for IE, on Tuesday in advance of the Platform Preview release. Gavin said that in the year since that the Chakra JavaScript engine used by IE9 was first demonstrated, its performance has improved by 310 percent.
“IE9 is now at the top spot [in JavaScript performance],” he said.
According to the blog post, “the differences between browsers on this microbenchmark are converging within thousandths of a second on tests that repeat operations many, many times to find any differences at all.” So the performance competition among browsers has tightened up. PCMag.com will be running its own tests for independent verification in upcoming articles.
“The significance of this release is really a by-product of our focus on all-around site performance, making the coding patterns that real-world developers are using in the wild for real-world sites faster,” said Gavin. “Our focus has been on hardware acceleration enabling rich performance of things like graphics, audio, video, and text through hardware acceleration using the power of the PC. With this seventh Platform Preview, we’re coupling that with incredibly fast JavaScript.”
Just three weeks ago, the company released the sixth Platform Preview, which added more HTML5 standard support—another goal of the new browser from Microsoft. Added in that version were support for CSS3 2D Transforms, semantic tags, and more.
