Microsoft's own speed tests show IE beating Chrome, Firefox

Just before announcing that Internet Explorer 8 has been finalized, Microsoft has released a new report titled "Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analysis." The document explains the various browser and network components and how each piece can impact performance when benchmarking, capabilities and limitations of various benchmarking tools, as well as ways to design tests to avoid these issues. What makes this report extremely dubious is the chart that is buried at the bottom. It shows IE8 outperforming Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0, something that no other test on the Internet has ever shown before.

Before I start to rant and rave, I want to explain that I am an IE8 user (in fact this post was written using IE8 on Windows 7), though I do use other browsers from time to time. IE8 is a vast improvement over IE7, especially in performance, but I will be the first to admit that it still does not compete with third-party browsers when it comes to speed. However, the table Microsoft provides shows the load times for the top 25 websites according to comScore, and IE8 does quite well.