Windows 7: IE9 will close performance gap, Microsoft says

IE9 will close performance gap, Microsoft says

Company backtracks, now says JavaScript performance is important

By Gregg Keizer
November 18, 2009 01:19 PM ET

Computerworld - 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.

Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, acknowledged that Microsoft had catching up to do. "We know we have a lot of work to do in some areas of performance," Sinofsky said today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

"On SunSpider, we're on par with IE9," Sinofsky said, showing a chart that displayed scores from the popular JavaScript benchmarking suite. Although IE9's scores were still slightly higher -- and thus slower -- than the newest browsers from competitors, its numbers were significantly better than IE8, Microsoft's current production edition.