Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 1: Hands On

What's New in IE10?

Leaving the hardware acceleration controversy aside for a moment, just what's new for IE10? Not much for the end user, at this point: The new version 10 preview, as with the Platform Previews for version 9, sports none of the browser's "chrome," or interface elements—just an underlying Web rendering engine. That means no bookmarks, history, or even a Back button. And very few sites currently take advantage of the new HTML5 capabilities supported in IE10 Platform Preview: CSS3 Multi-column Layout, CSS3 Grid Layout and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout, CSS3 Gradients, and ES5 Strict Mode.
The IE team has graciously provided some test pages that demonstrate these capabilties, however, at the IETestdrive site. They've also added new speed demos, including a new Fishbowl benchmark and a paintball game. I took the browser out for a spin using these and other non-Microsoft tests.
Speed Tests
First I'll compare the three big current browsers—using Microsoft's new speed demos—and then I'll run some alternative performance benchmarks from other sources. Of course, keep in mind that I'm comparing IE pre-release code to released versions of the other browsers. This is intentional, in order to show what kind of improvements we can expect compared with what's out there today. I tested using a medium-powered laptop, the Dell XPS M1330 with a 2.6-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 3GB RAM running 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate.
On Microsoft's new Fishbowl benchmark, you can now choose a lot more settings than you could in the earlier FishIE test: you can add a video background and effects like shine and shadow on the bowl as well as HTML5 audio of the filter sound. And you can now go up to 2,000 fish. With everything turned on and 50 fish loaded, IE10 PP1 clocked in at 40 frames per second, compared with 12fps for Chrome 10. Surprisingly, Firefox 4, which also uses hardware acceleration, came out a tad faster than IE10 PP1, at 42fps. IE9 took much longer to load the test, and then swung up and down between 38 and 56fps.
Possibly the best demonstration of hardware acceleration is the new Paintball demo, which splats colorful paint blobs across text on the screen. On this test, IE10 displayed the paint shots in rapid fire, taking 30.36 seconds to deliver 171.97 paintballs per minute. On the same test and PC, Chrome 10 was noticeably slower to shoot, took 67.94 seconds to shoot 76.83 paintballs, and didn't display the intro page correctly. Firefox 4 did display the intro page correctly, but not the test itself or the result numbers.
Moving to non-Microsoft speed tests, on the widely cited SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, IE10 PP1 excels, with a time of 244ms compared with Firefox's 280ms and Chrome's 285ms. On Mozilla's Kraken, Firefox was the winner, with a time of 6770ms. Chrome wasn't too far behind, taking 8473ms to complete. IE10's 14905ms showed a slight improvement over its predecessor's 15050ms. And on Google's V8 benchmark (version 6), IE10 scored 2367 (in this benchmark a higher score is better), compared with Firefox's better 3568 and Chrome's leading 8280.