Windows Experience Blog : Performance

Internet Explorer 8 helps you save time with Accelerators

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:47:46 GMT

There’s been a great deal of more talk lately about browser performance. You may have seen some previous discussion about page load performance as you saw here in a video and whitepaper in March. Page load ensures that you get to where you want to go quickly. But page load time differences actually measure about the length it takes for a person to blink their eye once, making a win for any browser pretty inconsequential as far as time savings go.

However, Internet Explorer 8 today offers a feature that saves you time and clicks and lets you get things done more quickly: Accelerators. Accelerators optimize the browser experience by removing repetitive, time consuming actions and give people easy access to the online services they use most. You can discover new Accelerators for Internet Explorer 8 at the Internet Explorer 8 Add-ons Gallery.

With all the talk about performance, we wanted to see what features like Accelerators really meant for time savings when people use the web, so we created another video looking at common tasks people actually do in four browsers: Safari 4.0, Chrome 2.0 beta, Firefox 3.5 beta 99 and Internet Explorer 8. Please note, all tests were performed using the default installation settings for each browser. No additional add-ons or extensions were added.

Here is a video that shows off how Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 make your browsing experience quicker and easier:

Accelerators in IE8 Help Save Time!

IE8 Gets You Where You Want To Go, Quickly

Brandon LeBlanc — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:04:33 GMT

As any browser vendor will quickly point out, accurately measuring the performance of a browser is extremely complex. On the surface, testing performance seems quite easy… visit a few sites with one browser and then again with a different browser, and simply time how long it took to load the page.

In reality, it’s much more complex than that.

Many things need to be taken into account when comparing the page load performance of different browsers. For example, due to the constantly changing nature of the Internet it is not easy to tell if the exact same content was delivered to each browser for each test. ISP’s, routers, and cable modems often cache their content, meaning that the page being loaded isn’t always coming all the way from the web server. The amount of network traffic can easily change between tests. All of these things (and more) can dramatically effect page load times.

Unfortunately, tools to accurately benchmark browser page load times don’t exist. All of the existing browser benchmarking tools available today are either narrow in their scope (SunSpider, Celtic Kane), inaccurate (iBench), or don’t consider important factors such as network latency, network congestion, and caching.

In the absence of effective benchmarking tools the Internet Explorer Team created a real world test which took the above mentioned factors into consideration and created a level playing field for all browsers tested. The results when comparing Internet Explorer 8 page load times to Firefox and Chrome were captured on video:

IE8 Performance

The performance video visually compares page load times between IE8, FF, and Chrome. Of the top 25 most popular sites in the world, IE8 wins 48% of the time, Chrome wins ~~38%~~ 36% of the time, and FF only wins 16% of the time. Of course, they didn’t cherry pick the sites they tested. They chose the top 25 sites as reported by ComScore in December 2008.

We encourage (and expect) people to run their own tests to measure page load times and for the browser industry at large to create a test that can accurately measure page load times – as seen by the user – across browsers. To assist people in running their own tests the Internet Explorer Team has also created a whitepaper which describes techniques that can be used to contend with some of the complex issues mentioned above.

For more information on Internet Explorer 8, visit www.microsoft.com/ie8.

UPDATED 6:16pm Pacific Time: Corrected percentage numbers to accurately reflect data from whitepaper.

Generate a System Health Report in Windows Vista

Brandon LeBlanc — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:45:00 GMT

In Windows Vista, users can have an extensive System Health Report generated for them in helping troubleshoot performance and reliability issues on their PC or to see how healthy their PC is in general. For the average user, this probably won't mean anything. But for me, I'm the type of user that really likes having the ability to create reports that tell me about my PC so I was really excited to find this ability in Windows Vista.

This evening I decided to generate a report on my main desktop PC for the first time and see what it says. To have a System Health Report generated:

Open Start Menu.
Right-click on "Computer" and click "Properties".
In the System Properties window, click on your Windows Experience Index rating.
In the Performance Information and Tools window, under "Tasks" in the left-hand options pane click "Advanced Tools".
Under Advanced Tools window choose "Generate a system health report" at the bottom.

The report generates after about 60 seconds of testing. Here is my System Health Report I generated this evening:

As you can see, any sort of errors or warnings for your system are displayed first at the top of the report. You can see from my report, my HP Photosmart C5100 Printer is disabled giving an error. This is because I recently switched my HP Photosmart C5100 from being connected to my PC via USB to being a network printer. I can ignore this error. Under warnings, my CPU was being consumed more than 50% by the EncoderUI.exe process. This is Microsoft Expression Encoder. I was encoding a HD video using Microsoft Expression Encoder at the time of running the System Health Check Report. Nothing to worry about there. Once the encoding was finished, I re-ran the report and my CPU usage dropped to an acceptable level.

In generating the System Health Report, a series of basic system and performance checks are completed. You can also check out your Software and Hardware configurations as well. The information in these tests is pretty detailed. Under Network and TCP you can see outbound and inbound IP traffic for example from when the report was generated or the exact amount of memory being used by processes.

You have the option to save your report as an HTML document if you would like. For me, if I need to save a report, I just print to an XPS document.

For folks using the latest version of Windows Live OneCare, you also have the ability to pull up monthly reports displaying information on PC scans, your monthly subscription, and firewall protection. By default, after a monthly tune-up is run your monthly report is displayed.