Meanwhile, back at the farm

Apple Insider posted a short writeup about the latest benchmarks on Internet Explorer 8 pre-release build. These two graphs show the benchmarks and you can read the ZDNet report that generated the benchmarks here.

I believe that not making javascript rendering one of the primary focuses of IE 8 is a huge oversight by Microsoft.  It also seems out of whack with there interest in jQuery and its integration with Visual Studio.  As web sites move more and more to a JavaScript heavy implementation the ability for the browser to quickly parse and execute JavaScript will become a key reason for picking it as your primary browser.

I’ve already seen issues with this in BlackBoard, the Learning Management System (LMS) at BYU-Idaho.  Blackboard’s most recent release of their GradeCenter underwent a major overhaul to add AJAX in a more rich implementation.  It wasn’t long before the faculty started to complain about how slow it was.  I did some initial tests and didn’t notice any slowness that was significant.  After doing some research I realized that I was using Firefox 3 and the faculty were using IE (6 and 7).  After doing some very unscientific benchmarking on my own I found that the GradeCenter would load in under 3 seconds on average in Firefox 3.  On Internet Explorer it was taking up to 20 seconds!  This research led us to start recommending Firefox 3 to faculty, a decision that was not easily swallowed by the IT department.

I was really hoping that IE 8 would improve their JavaScript rendering to help us support this issue, but alas, it is not to be.  In the meantime, I will continue to encourage individuals to move from IE to Firefox or Chrome if they want a better / faster browsing experience.