Nice roundup here and here on browser benchmarks suggesting that Firefox and Chrome are 3-4 times faster than the recently released Internet Explorer 8 RC 1. Opera fares better against Firefox/Chrome, but is still signficantly slower.
Yeah, that open source model will never work.
Of course, I doubt speed is the primary reason most of us use Firefox. I do have one suggestion, however, that might at least get me to use Internet Explorer more than once a month — either bring MSN Search into the 21st century or switch the default to Google.
Every so often I leave Internet Explorer open in my second monitor and before I realize I’m doing it, I pop in a search term and hit submit. I swear to god I think Alta Vista gave better results back in 1998 than MSN does today. The gap between what Google gives me vs. what MSN Search gives is like the difference between Pong and Far Cry.
Not to mention MSN Search’s design aesthetic seems to have been lifted from spam sites.
Everything about the IE user experience is just awful from beginning to end above and beyond any speed issue.
Here’s Western Digital’s press release announcing the launch of their 2TB hard drive,