Microsoft’s IE9 Platform Preview isn’t really a browser that is especially practical yet. There isn’t even a URL bar and the installation of the browser might be a bit inconvenient if you are running anything less than Vista SP2 (XP is not supported in any version, period.) But Microsoft has done its homework. The browser’s JavaScript performance is impressive. Mozilla’s current Firefox version is not as fast as IE9.

It can be a highly questionable to state which browser performs the best in any given environment. Network performances vary, websites have different components that will perform very differently in browsers and then there is the computer hardware which is another variable that impacts the time a in which a webpage is displayed on your screen.

Nevertheless, JavaScript benchmarks have somewhat become the standard in highlighting browser speed performance and of course we wanted to check whether Microsoft’s bold claim of a 5-6X speed boosts in IE9 is realistic. We have taken all current browsers through Google’s V8, the SunSpider as well as Celtic Kane JavaScript benchmarks.

Here are the results (IE9 Platform Preview against IE8, Firefox 3.6, Safari 4.04 and Chrome 4):

We will follow up with a much more detailed analysis, but it is already clear that IE9 has surpassed Firefox 3.6 and it should be about even or slightly ahead of the Beta version of Firefox 3.7. It is unlikely that IE9 will catch up with the Webkit-based Safari and Chrome browsers, but the performance gain over IE8 is impressive.

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Of course, the performance is somewhat reminiscent of the performance of IE8, which is substantially faster than IE7. At the time when IE8 Beta was shown for the first time, it wasn’t far behind of the Firefox 3.0 Beta. By the time Firefox 3.0 was released, IE8 was trailing the pack by a significant margin. We will have to wait to see if IE9 will be ahead of its rival when the final version is available.

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