IE9 benchmark shocker: 64-bit tanks

Well this is strange. Our buddies over at ZDNet (well they don’t know that we’re buddies yet) have completed their JavaScript benchmark comparisons of Internet Explorer 9 (both 32 and 64-bit), Opera 11, Firefox 4 RC, Chrome 10, and Safari 5 and the results were fairly mixed. There was no clear winner to the slew of tests but you Chrome fanboys can stroke your egos to the fact that Chrome came in first on two of the tests. Three of the four JavaScipt engines tested were developed by the same companies whose browsers were tested (SunSpider and Kraken by Mozilla and V8 by Google) while Peacekeeper was developed by Futuremark. Regardless, all four engines are big players in today’s browser wars. The tests were conducted on a slightly above average rig running Windows 7 64-bit to emulate the real word experiences of today’s tech user.

With that said you would assume that a 64-bit optimized browser would smoke a 32-bit browser on a 64-bit system, right? Apparently this is not the case for IE9 where its 64-bit version performed abysmally in three out of the four tests not only in comparison to its rivals, but even to its 32-bit brother. Check out the results:

Now I should note that JavaScript performance has been shaved down to the point where there’s only a few milliseconds difference between most of the browsers tested. Most people won’t notice the minuscule time differences (unless you’re dealing with Kraken on IE9 64-bit, in which case a dose of FUUUUU and a dash of aneurysm might come into play) in the real world but the significant margin between IE9 64-bit and all the other browsers is something definitely to note, especially since a 64-bit OS was used. It’s no secret that 64-bit processes use slightly more memory than 32-bit ones, but that shouldn’t have such a drastic affect on Microsoft browser performance, especially since Microsoft is rumored to be axing 32-bit from its next version of Windows. In the meantime, you should browse Gawker with IE9 32-bit.


Source: ZDNet

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