Is Chrome Slower Than IE9 & Firefox? A New Study Says It Is

This may come as a surprise to a lot of Chrome users: A new study about page speed and website performance says that Google’s Chrome web browser performed slower than both IE9 and Firefox in a recent analysis of retail website home pages.

The findings come from Strangeloop Networks’ annual ecommerce page speed and website performance report, just released today.

The company tested the home pages of the top 2,000 Alexa-ranked retail websites and found that both IE9 and Firefox 7 were about five percent faster than Chrome.

In its report, Strangeloop doesn’t claim that its study “definitively answers the question of which browser offers the best performance,” but the data is interesting enough to be included.

The report is about much more than browser performance, though, and includes a number of interesting data points on overall website performance.

The average load time (in IE7) of a top 2,000 retail site is 10 seconds for a first-time visitor. Strangeloop says this is about a 10 percent improvement over last year’s study, when first-time visits involved a page load time of 11.21 seconds. The median load time this year was 8.4 seconds.

While first visits are faster this year, the average load time for repeat visits is 20 percent slower. That number was 5.2 seconds last year, but grew to 6.6 seconds in this year’s study.

Strangeloop points out that all of these load times are much higher than the “ideal load time of 2 seconds, as identified by decades of research into human-computer interaction.”

You can download the report from Strangeloop’s website. It’s free, but contact information is required.