Internet Explorer Versus FireFox Javascript
Terry, a co-worker of mine, sent me an interesting e-mail last night. He did some speed tests on a javascript sorting function we use in our programs. I’ll just post the contents of his email:
Although it seems to be “conventional wisdom” on the Internet that Internet Explorer executes Javascript inefficiently versus the Mozilla/FireFox family of browsers, I decided to run a direct comparison test of the two.
The rules were as follows:
1) All Sales Report HTML Table rows were populated.
2) Javascript code is heavily optimized, and object references are minimized using globals where appropriate.
3) FireFox version 2.0.0.4 used.
4) Internet Explorer 6.0.290 used.
5) VendWatch as it currently exists, was utilized as the basis for the tests.
Results were as follows:
BROWSER
Row Count
DATE Data
STRING Data
NUMERIC Data
FireFox
365
2.703 secs
1.015 secs
1.188 secs
Internet Explorer
365
6.454 secs
3.047 secs
4.875
FireFox
100
0.516 secs
0.266 secs
0.234 secs
Internet Explorer
100
1.078 secs
0.469 secs
0.890 secs
FireFox
999
8.984 secs
3.531 secs
3.063 secs
Internet Explorer
999
31.578 secs
15.734 secs
24.031 secs
As can be seen above, Internet Explorer was consistently considerably slower than FireFox. Keep in mind that the performance timing is only counting time while the sorting logic was running and was not counting anything else. The goal was to keep the timing as close to what a user would see as possible.
Obviously the conventional wisdom is 100% accurate as regards Internet Explorer, and although it might have been interesting to have included IE7.x in the above tests ( due to Microsoft insistence that they have “improved” javascript performance ), it is obviously so much more preferable to be running FireFox that I just did not bother to do so !
Another strike against IE.