With IE 8 being expected to be released any day now http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2009/03/12/2003438292 the discussions are not only focusing around the new features such as Accelerators or WebSlices, but also on the question of performance. How will IE8 compare to competitive browser technology?

For the Internet Explorer 8 performance published, the Top 25 websites in the world were used as measured by comScore to reflect the sites users are most likely to visit on the web. The following table shows results from the benchmark testing process for those 25 websites tested on the following browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8. As noted earlier, Microsoft chooses approximately 25 websites for daily testing, and tens of thousands on a monthly basis. Any list of websites to be used for benchmarking must contain a variety of websites, including international websites, to help ensure a complete picture of performance as users would experience on the Internet.

More information on the testing process and and the shown results can be found @

http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/E/41E87D81-DA93-4FCF-A8C8-1C098F0B848C/Measuring%20Browser%20Performance.pdf