Tim Cook <z99### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> The whole article is going on about 'well, ok, IE8 is a teeny bit faster 
> loading pages than Firefox', then the last paragraph says "In practical, 
> everyday use, you likely won't notice much of a difference between IE 8 and 
> Firefox 3. Due to the fact that broadband connections are so commonplace 
> today, and the fact that browsers in general can load pages faster than they 
> could even a couple years ago, the page load time differences between the 
> two are relatively moot."

> Basically, it grudgingly admits that IE8 is a little bit better in a 
> particular aspect, then dismissing it as irrelevant, where with any other 
> browser, any speed increase would be trumpeted as the greatest thing since 
> sliced breat (especially if it were for a Mac).

  Seriously though, IMO speed is certainly not the main issue with web
browsers. Security, stability and implementation of standards is. Whether
the browser can display a huge page in 2 or 3 seconds is not all that
relevant compared.

  IE has a very sad history in this regard. While maybe not the absolute
first, it nevertheless basically defined the whole concept of insecure
web browsing (in other words, simply going to a web page could get your
computer infected with a trojan, virus, adware or other malware, without
you even having to do anything special).

  Some argue that IE is not the only browser which has suffered from such
security holes. However, the main issue that IE hasn't had one or two such
issues. It has had a myriad of them during its 10+ year history. No year
has gone by without at least a half dozen serious security flaws having
been found (often after it has been too late). While other browser have
not been completely free from security holes, their overall history has
usually been much cleaner, with far, far fewer flaws, compared.

  The reason for this can arguably be said to be that other (modern)
browsers were designed to be secure from the start, while IE was not.
IE was never even designed to be secure, and security measures were only
kludged afterwards on top of the old code. It has not been until very
recently that MS redesigned IE from scratch to correct this. (And even
then the end result has been somewhat dubious, with all the backwards
compatibility with ActiveX and such crap, which is only begging for
security holes, no matter how much you try to avoid them.)

  The other sad history of IE is that MS has never cared about established
web standards and invented their own, as usual. Also some design principles
in IE have in the past made very hard to make complex web pages which are
fully compatible with IE and other more standard-compliant browsers at the
same time. (It's not like Netscape is completely innocent of this either,
but at least Netscape is practically dead, while IE isn't.)

  Also IE became really infamous for dragging behind in implementing the
latest standards for years and years, leaving their "customers" with little
to no support for them. This seriously hurt the advances in web technologies
for many years.

  Again, it hasn't been but very recently that MS has swallowed its pride
and actually started to try to implement all the standards that other
browsers have implemented for over half decade. And this was only because
other browsers started to get scaringly popular.

  It's no wonder that many people feel that this is "too little, too late".
IE has already get a bad reputation of being insecure and lacking in
standard-compliance. A new-and-better version is not going to clean this
reputation overnight. IE loading a page in 2 seconds while Firefox loads
it in 3 is certainly not enough to clean its history and reputation.

  Thus "the page load time differences between the two are relatively moot"
is spot-on. It's really not an issue of speed. It's an issue of trust.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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