IE7 on XP Outperforms Safari 3 on Mac OS X

On its official website, Apple claims that Safari 3.0 outperforms Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9 in terms of both HTML and JavaScript performance. Of course, as a disclaimer, the Cupertino-based hardware company does state that the actual performance of the browsers depends on different factors including the network connection and system configuration, and that results can vary. This is a good thing because Sean Christmann, an Experienced architect at EffectiveUI released a benchmark of IE7 and Safari 3.0 running in Windows XP and Mac OS X on the same Macbook Pro machines. The conclusion of the Rich Internet Application test does not favor Safari in the least.

"The reference design was originally created in Flex and then ported to the technologies listed," Christmann explained. "All results listed in the matrix as well as the detailed results page were run on the same Macbook Pro running Leopard for OS X, and running Win XP under a Boot Camp partition. Each test case was run 3 times in a new browser instance and the highest framerate observed was recorded. For the HTML test, the fastest performing browser on a each OS was used in the comparison matrix (Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3 won for their respective OSes). All subsequent plugin based tests for the OS were tested in those browsers."

According to Christmann, GUIMark was designed as a benchmark test suite set up to permit comparison of RIA technologies. And when it comes down to rendering systems of UI runtimes, Internet Explorer 7 left Safari 3.0 in the dust, as you can see from the graphics included in this article, courtesy of Christmann. It seems that Apple's superior performance claims for Safari 3.0 are nothing more than another case of marketing, with little relevance in real case scenarios. And this in the context when, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer, presenting Beta 1 of IE8 at MIX08 in March in Las Vegas, indicated that both Apple and Safari deliver better memory usage compared to IE7.

"I've been surprised with the results so far between WinXP and OS X," Christmann added. "On the same machine it's very clear which vendors take more advantage of the underlying hardware. The results for the different plugin technologies aren't too surprising since it's regularly admitted that most companies spend their optimization time on Windows due to its larger install base. This argument doesn't hold any water though when comparing html rendering on Safari/Mac against IE /Windows where there's roughly a 1.6 : 1 advantage to the IE team."

Internet Explorer 7 is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download here.