Google yesterday released an open-source micro-benchmark test named as RoboHornet for evaluating the browser performance. In the performance test, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 scored extremely well, but what was puzzling was Chrome’s own performance in the test. It was extremely bad and displeasing. Firefox fell flat on its face on every platform except OS X, where it managed to place ahead of Opera. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 RTM build came out the winner all the way!
Though Microsoft appreciated the gesture (IE 10 Performance) and praised its engineering team for building such a browser, it didn’t consider Google’s general-purpose browser speed test RoboHornet as the representative of a browser experience since the test on the specific aspects of browser performance only and not the performance users might encounter on real-world sites.
What Microsoft firmly believes is that most benchmarks such as Kraken benchmark of Mozilla, Octane benchmark of Google do not cover all the aspects of a browser performance. For instance, take SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. It bechmarks only a browser’s JavaScript performance and not other important browser technologies and features that matter more.
Microsoft therefore came up with the new version of the open-source browser benchmark – RoboHornet Pro that seems to take the same Google’s RoboHornet micro-benchmak approach, but run it in the context of a real-world scenario. The impartial benchmark takes into account all the essential factors for evaluating a browser.
It uses modern web technologies like CSS3 Animations, CSS3 Transforms, CSS3 Text Shadows, custom WOFF fonts, Unicode, and Touch. Under Microsoft’s test, Chrome as expected, fails to deliver.
Chrome slows down on several occasions, crawls and stops responding at times that’s because it hasn’t been designed to handle a benchmark load in the context of a real-world scenario, says Microsoft. On the other hand, Internet Explorer 10 remains responsive, continues animating the screen, and finishes the test in less than half the time that Chrome does.
If you do not believe it, you can test your browser at RoboHornet Pro or take a look at the video below.
Source: Windows Team Blog.
