Microsoft’s IE9 Platform Preview 3 arrived with lots of promise, more hardware acceleration as well as more JavaScript speed. Microsoft claims that it is now within reach of the fastest browsers out there. Of course we checked and found that Microsoft may be stretching facts just a bit, but it is fact that IE9 is gaining speed quickly. As far as JavaScript is concerned, it has traded roles with Firefox, which has fallen behind IE9.

As disappointing as IE8 was, there is no denying that Microsoft will be back in the browser scene with a very competitive IE9. The platform previews the company has posted so far are gaining speed quickly, while Microsoft is also focusing on hardware acceleration, which appears to be working quite well in the latest preview release of IE9.

Compared to IE9 PP2, the PP3 release has gained more than 14% of JavaScript performance in Sunspider, more than 51% in Google’s V8 benchmark and about 19% in Celtic Kane. The IE9 preview is now well ahead of the latest trunk builds of Firefox 3.7a6-pre in Sunspider (501 ms vs. 665 ms), ahead in Google’s V8 (1168 vs. 898) and leads in Celtic Kane (355 vs. 234). However, the Firefox preview still leads in the more general Futuremark Peacekeeper (3221 vs. 2353).

The detailed test results are as follows. Please keep in mind that these results may differ from what you will see on your PC, as browser benchmarks vary greatly depending on the hardware and software platform you are using. These results are based on an Intel quad-core system running Windows Vista. D2D acceleration in Firefox 3.7a6-pre was active.

There is no clear indication how Firefox will shape up, as the release of the 4.0 beta is unclear. However, the developer team noted yesterday that the code-freeze for the software is imminent (thanks for the info to our reader Aki). We already know that hardware acceleration will not make it into this release and it appears that the new Javascript engine JaegerMonkey will be delayed as well.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.