March 26th, 2009
Is IE8 really fat and slow?
Since IE8 shipped last week, I’ve been following reviews and user feedback closely. A lot of the reactions to Microsoft’s new browser come down to personal preference: Some people like the usability-oriented tweaks Microsoft made, others think the browser is too busy or cluttered. It’s hard to argue with opinions.
But two criticisms have come up repeatedly that can be measured empirically, so I thought I would do that here. One is the burning question of whether IE8 is faster or slower than its competitors; the other is whether it makes reasonable use of system resources. In this post, I explain why some people are seeing performance issues (and share an obscure system tweak that might just cure IE8 performance and stability problems). I also take a closer look at why some browsers use more memory than others.
When it comes to browser speed tests, I have yet to find an objective consensus from the published data. Microsoft’s tests, not surprisingly, show that page load times are competitive with (and in many cases, faster than) its rivals on most popular pages.
That conclusion was borne out by a series of independent tests performed by PC World, which concluded that IE8 really is faster than Firefox:
By and large, we found that Internet Explorer 8 performed well, and beat out Firefox 3.0.7 in the majority of our time trials. However, IE 8’s performance advantage is relatively negligible. In most of our testing, IE 8’s advantage was half a second or less.
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg reached the opposite conclusion in his review:
in my tests, IE8 wasn’t as fast as Firefox, or two other notable browsers — the Windows version of Apple’s new Safari 4 and Google’s Chrome. IE8 loaded a variety of pages I tested more slowly than any of the other browsers, and it grew sluggish when juggling a large number of Web pages opened simultaneously in tabs
I was baffled by Mossberg’s results. When I tried the same tests on several PCs here with IE8, Firefox 3.0.7, and Google Chrome, I got the same results as PC World. In general, all pages loaded so quickly in all three browsers that detecting any difference with a stopwatch was nearly impossible. If I tried to graph the results, it would look like a picket fence.
Then, I heard from a colleague (let’s call her Mary Jo), who was having problems nearly identical to those that Mossberg reported. Using IE8 on Windows XP, she reported:
It’s running horribly. I am having a ton of performance problems with multiple tabs open. After opening four or five tabs, things slow down and the tab progress indicator spins endlessly if I try to open a new tab.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, the problem was so bad that simply closing IE wasn’t enough, as multiple processes of Iexplore.exe continued running and had to be killed manually.
We did the basic troubleshooting, checking for the current version of popular add-ons like Flash (up to date) and confirming that system resources weren’t a problem (1GB of RAM on XP should be plenty).
So I checked with a few colleagues on some back channels and discovered a tweak that had worked for other people. From a Command Prompt window, I had her run the following command:
regsvr32 actxprxy.dll
That re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library, an obscure DLL that most people (even Microsoft experts) had never heard about. (Update: 27-Mar: Note that if you try this using Windows Vista, you must do this from an elevated Command Prompt window; type cmd in the Start menu Search box, right-click the Cmd.exe shortcut, and then choose Run As Administrator. For detailed instructions with screen shots, see this post.) After restarting her computer, she tried using IE8 again. The results were stunning:
WOW. That really made a difference. It made my performance faster and more stable. Tabs are opening faster and more consistently instead of spinning endlessly.
After several hours, my colleague reported that she was ready to give IE8 a second chance instead of “chucking it and going to Chrome out of frustration.”
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Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/27/09
