Thoughts On Web » Browsers

IE9 is coming

Galeel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:21 +0000

After IE8, Microsoft is working hard to improve their Browser’s Javascript performance. The new browser had been in development only for the last three weeks, since microsoft released Windows 7.

Microsoft today claimed that its next browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), has nearly closed the JavaScript performance gap between itself and rivals made by Mozilla and Google, even though the browser has been in development only a few weeks.

Microsoft dug a huge hole when it mostly abandoned IE6 and the Web from 2001 until 2006. Their early efforts at ramping back up with IE7 were a big disappointment to most Web developers and while their efforts with IE8 were much better, they’re still at least a full generation behind the modern browsers.

Microsoft’s IE8, and to an even greater extent, IE7 and the older-but-still-widely-used IE6, have been left in the dust on JavaScript performance by rivals, particularly Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The latter two are built atop the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

IE9 had improved its Acid3 score. They have made some improvements in IE9, which now scores 32 out of 100. IE8, they scored 24 out of 100. Current builds of Chrome, Safari and Opera all score 100, while Firefox 3.6, which is still in beta, makes it to 92 out of 100.

Release schedule for IE9, or public preview are not yet available.

Related Links:

Page Speed – Google’s Firefox Addon used to identify ways to speed up your web pages

Galeel — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:16:57 +0000

Web page load time is an important factor in web design and development, not only web developers but bloggers and site owners need to optimize their web pages so they load faster or else retaining users will be difficult.

There are many tools which analyze web pages and show you ways to improve load times. Firebug for Firefox is a useful plug-in for analyzing web page CSS, JavaScript, DOM and other stuff.

Google has released a Firefox addon called Page Speed that is integrated with Firebug. The Page speed add-on when installed adds tabs to Firebug console. Yahoo has a similar addon called YSlow for Firebug that analyzes web pages and suggests improvements for performance of web pages.

Page Speed - firebug tab in action

You can analyze web page performance using this add-on, click on “Analyze Performance” button in the page speed tab in firebug. It gives optimization tips upon examining the web pages. The tips ranges from highly recommended, moderate to least. These tips will provide short description and clicking on the link will take you to page speed documentation where you can read more on how to optimize your site.

The Show Resources link will show you the objects loaded in the web page with the type of the object, file size and transfer size. You might find some scripts and images that are too heavy here, better to get rid of them or minimize them.