Thursday, October 15, 2009

China: Browser tests

While in China I'm going to be testing how quickly our Westminster sites load- particularly our LMS, wiki, and web conferencing tools. To do this test we are going to be taking at three laptops and we will purchase one there. We will be running tests from the hotel, on campus, at a student home, and from an internet cafe.

I have assumed that I should be performing these tests with Internet Explorer. I've heard that China tends to use mostly Microsoft products, but I thought before I go that I'd do a speed test while still in Utah so I have a comparison. I don't use I.E. very often, so I decided to run my own browser comparison to see what is the best browser for the Westminster IT system.

The browsers I've used to compare are:
  • Internet Explorer 8.0.6
  • Firefox 3.5.3
  • Google Chrome 3.0.1
  • Safari 4.0.3
The complete results can be seen on this Google Doc: Division of New Learning Browser Test.

There were 27 sites that got tested. Here is a table which shows the total number of sites where each browser was best and worse.

Browser Best Worst
Internet Explorer 3 17
Firefox 9 3
Chrome 7 2
Safari 8 5

I find it interesting that IE is the most popular browser in the world, but from what I've seen it has the worst performance.

1 comment:

Terrie said...

Fascinating!! Really.