14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 10 absolutely shines on Windows 8 and it’s ready to provide a stellar web browsing experience, Microsoft has been touting in the last couple of days.
But that’s not entirely true, Scierra, the developer of HTML5-based game creation web app Construct 2, said in a blog post.
Scierra claims that Internet Explorer 10 actually lacks many important features and it doesn’t support WebGL API, which basically turns it into a much slower browser as compared to its rivals.
A new series of tests performed by the game developer has revealed that Internet Explorer 10 is actually 22 times slower than Google Chrome, while Firefox is eight times faster than Microsoft’s in-house browser.
“As WebGL technology is refined and improved, IE is sorely losing out from the performance gains to be had,” Scierra wrote on the blog.
While Internet Explorer 10 comprises some technical improvements aimed at browser-based games, it’s still disappointing when it comes to HTML5 games performance.
“IE10 introduces only a small selection of features for games over IE9: requestAnimationFrame, offline support (AppCache), and touch events (in Microsoft's own custom form), and slightly improved performance over IE9,” Scierra wrote.
“However other browsers have had these features for a long time now, and IE10's release does very little to catch up. It is still way behind Chrome and Firefox, and appears to be falling even further behind as time goes on: the improvement from IE9 to IE10 is much smaller than the strides Chrome and Firefox have taken in the same time.”
Internet Explorer 10 was initially available for Windows 8 users exclusively, but given its “outstanding” performance, Microsoft decided to design a dedicated version aimed at the Windows 7 platform.
A release preview has been unveiled on Tuesday, while the final build could be launched either later this year or in early 2013. It turns out that users have already found bugs in the Windows 7 version of Internet Explorer 10, but most of them are very likely to be fixed in the next update.