Nov 17, 2010 17:29 GMT  ·  By

Long have browser vendors such as Mozilla, Google, Safari and Opera fought over which browser is the fastest in the world with no real contest from Microsoft. This has all changed today, with the latest developer preview, Internet Explorer 9 claims the no. 1 spot in the Webkit Sunspider JavaScript microbenchmark.

The Redmond company just released the seventh Platform Preview of IE9, and the Build is faster that Chrome 8.0 Beta, Opera 11 Alpha, Opera 10.63, Chrome 7.0, Firefox 4.0 Beta 7, Safari 5.0.2 and Firefox 3.6.

But although this is a first for the software giant, Microsoft is not really celebrating. And the reason has been stated time and again by Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer, and other members of the IE team.

No benchmark, and certainly no microbenchmark, Webkit Sunspider included, is capable of reflecting the actual performance of IE9 or rival browsers. Instead, SunSpider is focused on a single aspect, namely JavaScript.

“We’ve been consistent in our point of view that these tests are at best not very useful, and at worst misleading,” Hachamovitch explained.

“Even with the most recent results in the chart above, our motivations and our point of view remain unchanged.

“We’ve focused on improving real world site performance. We’ve made progress on some microbenchmarks as a side effect. Focusing on another subsystem microbenchmark is not very useful.”

The Corporate VP of IE also used the launch of IE9 Platform Preview 7 to respond to some questions that have been raised over the Webkit Sunspider JavaScript microbenchmark results that Microsoft has been constantly publishing with every milestone of the next iteration of Internet Explorer 9.

Hachamovitch underlined that Microsoft tests IE9 and rival browsers in a consistent lab setup and that this is how the results are generated.

“Reporting results that “rely on a ‘shell’ JS engine that runs in a command line” is odd because those results don’t reflect the user’s experience in a browser. Similarly, because the point of a browser is to run actual websites, not just benchmarks, the chart we publish continues to include two versions of each other browser,” he noted.

IE8 wraps up SunSpider in 3746ms, Firefox 3.6.12 is at 753ms and Safari 5.0.2 at 328ms. Firefox 4.0 Pre-Release Beta 7 is the slowest of the next generation browsers with 277ms, outpaced by Chrome 7.0 with 262ms, Opera 10.63 – 246ms, Opera 11 Alpha – 242ms and Chrome 8.0 Beta – 233ms.

IE9 Platform Preview #7 was released exactly one year after Hachamovitch showcased Internet Explorer 9 for the first time at PDC 2009.

Since then, performance optimizations built into IE9 have made it possible for the browser to finish SunSpider in 216ms, the fastest out of all rival browser. This translates to an improvement of JavaScript performance by 345% (as measured by SunSpider) for Internet Explorer 9 since the first preview back in November 2009.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.

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