Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | March 10, 2011, 7:26am PST

Summary

I, and a lot of my readers, were puzzled about why my recent SunSpider results showed IE 9 doing so badly compared to Chrome 10, so I took a closer look. This time IE 9 took first by a nose.

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32-bit, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Internet Explorer, 64-bit Version, Web Browsers, 64-Bit, Internet, Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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When I recently took a look at the brand new Chrome 10 Web browser, the results for the latest release candidate of Internet Explorer (IE) 9 puzzled me because they were so bad. Some of my readers were more than puzzled. Some were outraged and accused me of deliberating trying to set up IE to fail. Please. I call them like I see them and, in my tests, the IE 9 RC was just dreadfully slow compared to the others.

Still, as I said, I wasn’t happy with my results. When I started hearing from people that I respected, like my ZDNet bud Ed Bott, that he was also seeing results that put IE 9 RC just ahead of Chrome, I decided to re-run my benchmarks and take a closer look at my results.

The first thing I did was to start talking with Microsoft, who, as you might have guessed, had wanted to talk to me anyway, and to set up a new benchmark PC. This time around I picked a Gateway SX2802-07 desktop. This PC uses a 2.6GHZ Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 processor and has 6GBs of RAM and a 640GB hard-drive.

I burned out everything that currently lived on that system with my favorite system repair Linux distribution SystemRescueCD. I then installed on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit from the partitions on up. After that I brought it up to date with Windows 7 SP1. In passing, let me say that while I know some people have had trouble with Windows 7 SP1, SP1 is a good patch. While it’s not as big a comparative improvement as Windows XP SP3was in its day, I think most Windows 7 users would be better off going with SP1.

OK, so I now have a fresh system with nothing on it except Windows. Once more I installed the latest IE 9 release candidate. This time though there was nothing else on the system, not even Chrome 10 yet, that might cause trouble. And, once again I sent IE 9 64-bit on its trip through the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark 0.91 and this time it came in 1111.3ms (milliseconds). Yuck!

I was getting closer to working out the riddle though. I had used the 64-bit version of IE9 because generally speaking 64-bit applications run marginally faster on 64-bit architectures. Now, with a Web browser that’s not likely to make a big difference. The real win for the current generation of most 64-bit software is its access to more than 4GBs of RAM. Or, in Windows case, about 3.25GB, once you’ve taken out the RAM used for the BIOS, the PCI and PCI Express buses, etc. etc. With a 64-bit system, you have a theoretical maximum of 16 Exabytes, or about 16-billion GBs, but Microsoft currently puts a 16TB limit on address space and allows only 128GB of physical RAM. Only HD photography and video editors are likely to run into limits.

Still, 32-bit IE 9 would need to run on Windows on Windows 64-bit (WOW64)–which had nothing to do with World of Warcraft–and WoW64 could have caused slightly reduced 32-bit IE 9’s speed. Well, that’s what I thought anyway.

But, then I ran 32-bit IE 9 on my 64-bit Windows 7. Wow. Now, IE 9 came in at 245.4ms. This was actually faster than Chrome 10, which came in at 266.7ms. So, for the moment at least IE9 is actually the fastest browser I’ve tested to date.

Page 2: [Why 32-bit IE is faster than 64-bit IE] »

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system

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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
strange. I got 219ms on my pc last time. I?m pretty sure i?m always running 64bit but i?ll recheck tonight. btw my pc is intel Quad q9550 (2.8ghz) + 4gb ram (800mhz).
bnlf
03/10/2011 07:44 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@bnlf Not really your Quad's a faster than what I used.

Steven
sjvn@...
03/10/2011 07:50 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@sjvn@...
I have 12 quads on my PC, beat that!!!
Hasam1991
03/10/2011 08:06 AM
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So Steven, when you tested IE9 on Windows 7 *32* bit yesterday
@sjvn@...
This you wrote at 03/09/2011 11:51 AM:
@G-Systems You know I thought my IE9 numbers were quite slow also, so before I wrote that tale, I tried it several more times--on Win 7 SP1 32 and 64-bit systems and on several different PCs. It still was slow as heck.
Are the results you get "today" different now that you know the explanation? What changed?

IE9 64 bit will not run on 32 bit Windows, so if you tested on a 32 bit Windows 7 SP1, how come you still had it "slow as heck" when we now know that the explanation is that the 64bit RC is not yet using the same JIT'er?

Steven, did you really test IE9 on a 32 bit Windows 7? If you did, then I am really puzzled that you are satisfied with the 64/32 bit explanation.

Or, were you (gosh!) just lying a little bit about the lengths you went to?
honeymonster
(Edited: 03/10/2011 05:17 PM)
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An unclear correction has led to more confusion.
@ honeymonster

Vaughan-Nichols's initial deception, and less than clear correction, has how generated a new round of confusion, as readers try to figure out how to install/run the 32-bit version of IE9 on 64-bit Windows. What they don't realise, of course, is that 32-bit IE9 is the one they've been running all along -- and that all the other major browsers are 32-bit too.

This fact that 32-bit is the default for all the major browsers, including IE9, is central to any open and honest correction. Unfortunately, this key point was only mentioned in a quote from Tim Sneath on page two, amongst a barrage of irrelevant details and confused nonsense (e.g. confusing RAM limits in 32- versus 64-bit OSes with the address-space limits for 32- versus 64-bit processes running on a 64-bit OS, and the implication that things like reinstalling the OS had anything to do with the results).

Sheer incompetence may explain Vaughan-Nichols's implication that 64-bit IE9 is the norm, and that running 32-bit IE9 requires some extra effort. However, in view of the record, I'm afraid I'm inclined to suspect otherwise.
WilErz
03/10/2011 11:54 PM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@bnlf yea a E5200 is pretty slow. So if your running a C2Q then its not surprise that your results were alot better. I have a Phenom II so if I ran it I'm sure I would get a much better score aswell.
Jimster480
03/10/2011 11:02 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@bnlf
I just ran the benchmark and got 176.1. I'm running 64 bit ie9 on an SSD.
Dmachine
03/10/2011 05:26 PM
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This was a problem during the IE9 beta as well!
Scroll down to the beta benchmarks on this page: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/windows-browsers-benchmarked-october-2010-edition.ars
Empro
03/10/2011 07:56 AM
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horrific
That is just horrific all around.
1) That they are focusing their effort on 32-bit.
2) They they HAVE to focus effort on a specific architecture for an APPLICATION.
3) That they designed Windows x64 in a way that code has to be reengineered instead of simply rebuilt (as with most other systems).
4) And thanks to 3, that the 64-bit browser can't load 32-bit extensions.
cabdriverjim
03/10/2011 08:01 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@cabdriverjim - it's a question of resources.

If you had a team with a finite number of people and a finite amount of time available to create a brand new product, would you opt to spend the majority of your time optimizing your product for 99% of your customers or for 1% of your customers?

As the article correctly states, only apps that require > 2GB RAM per instance will benefit from being ported to 64-bit. 64-bit code and data is bigger than 32-bit code and data. This means that 64-bit code and data takes up more disk space, more memory, more IO to read and write to/from disk and reduces cache efficiency.

Rememberin that IE9 largely runs each browser tab in its own process. Thus, a 64-bit browser isn't REQUIRED unless an individual page required > 2GB RAM.

Further, until Adobe and others port their plug-ins for Flash, Reader, etc. to 64-bit, 64-bit browsers (like IE8/9 64-bit) won't be able to render flash, video, PDF's, etc.

Microsoft have done absolutely the right thing by spending all their budget on optimizing IE9 for 99% of its customers and partners. They're already working on optimizing Chakra for 64-bit and will release that update later.
bitcrazed
03/10/2011 10:45 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@bitcrazed There are already 64 bit plugins. I use 64 bit minefield with no issues. And the 64 bit app uses no more ram than a 32 bit app. Because with 64 bit processing, things that would take 2 sets of instructions can take only 1 (because of the larger addressing).
Jimster480
03/10/2011 11:05 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@Jimster480 - you may be using 2 plug-ins, but there are tens of thousands out there that are still only 32-bit.

You clearly don't understand what happens when you compile your app to x64: 64-bit apps are on average around 25-30% larger than the exact same code compiled to 32-bit. This is because every pointer is now doubled in size (to 64-bits) and that every int is now 64 bits long rather than 32 bits long.

64-bit code can, in some situations, make better use of the larger number of registers available on x64 chips.

As you (partially correctly stated) x64 code can sometimes optimize calculations by using larger operands, thus reducing the number of instructions used, but this generally constitutes a microscopically small proportion of most app code.

As an example, compare the sizes of the common files in "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer" (64-bit IE) and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer" (32-bit IE).
bitcrazed
03/10/2011 04:32 PM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@cabdriverjim thats just IE. I run 64 bit minefield with 64 bit Flash. And there are no issues. Its very fast aswell. And it has HW acceleration.
Jimster480
03/10/2011 11:03 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
Have you ever actually done anything at all with 32/64bit development? For one thing, _every_ program on _every_ system that runs on x86_64 (at the least) has to be rearchitectured for 64bit. When SuSE GMBH brought out the first 64bit Linux they had to provide both 32 and 64bit libraries and guess what, the browser plugins only worked in 32bit. This is _not_ a Windows specific problem, this is a problem borne of silicon which provides 64bit instructions as an extension to a natively 32bit marchitecture.

Next time, get a clue before spooging your ignorance across the internet.
odubtaig
03/10/2011 11:06 AM
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RE: Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered
@odubtaig

I was in Sun Microsystems' Solaris OS/Net group when we did the first 64 bit version of Solaris. While I don't want to trivialize the effort, to say that "_every_ program on _every_ system that runs on x86_64 (at the least) has to be rearchitectured for 64bit" is a gross exaggeration.
philip.robar@...
03/10/2011 09:14 PM
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