Can: To see a browser – Take off its clothes

This is from a recent trip that I took and met few people who were Firefox users. Most of them were using FireFox at home and IE at work.. and most of them felt that FireFox was “faster” –meaning it would load websites faster and FF itself would load faster..

So, I devised this test and called it the “Naked Browser” challenge. Are you upto taking this? Here is what were are trying to do – kill most of the add-ons in IE and then test it against FF. Here are some step by step instructions -

Make sure you are running the IE8 Release Candidate 1. To make sure that you are on this version, just go to IE Help menu and click on “About Internet Explorer”. you should see Release Candidate 1 mentioned as follows:

Go to Tools –> Manage Add-Ons. In the Manage Add-Ons window, click on each Application and disable the add-on. You can can disable the add-on by clicking on the “Disable” button located at bottom right, once you have selected the application in the upper window.

Next, change the home page for both browsers to the same website of your choice.

Finally, close all the browser windows on your machine. You are all set for the challenge to start.

Browser load test: Start both the browsers by clicking on the shortcuts on the taskbar one after the another. What browser did you see come up faster?

Browsing Speed test: Type your favourite website address in notepad and copy it in memory (Ctrl + C). then in each browser, paste the URL (Ctrl+v) and press go button. Watch for the status bar at the bottom of browser window to say “Done”. Which browser completed loading the website first?

Do let me know what you observed on your machine?

In my experience, IE 8 WAS faster than FireFox in most of the cases for browsing speed and load test. I am using Vista SP2 RC. I will soon be sharing the screen recording of what i experienced shortly here.

also, Microsoft seems to have just released a study that validates what i just mentioned. A Microsoft video has also been released to demo the same. The study has detailed steps on how to test the browsers yourself (much detailed than the one detailed above by me).. in the report, out of 25 websites IE was the fastest for 12. FireFox was fastest in only 4 and in remaining cases Chrome was the fastest.

Take my “Naked Browser” challenge now and tell me what you see!