Web performance tracker New Relic has revealed that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is not only the most used browser on Windows operating systems, but also the fastest. Not too shocking, all things considered. That's not to say it's the fastest browser across the board, however.
According to New Relic, IE holds 40 percent of the overall browser market on Windows and its latest version IE9 loads in just three seconds. New versions of Firefox and Chrome are tied for second in speediness at 3.5 seconds. In terms of popularity, however, Google's browser enjoys a 33 percent share of the market while Mozilla's sits at 24 percent.
On the Apple side, the company claims browser speeds on Macs are generally around one second quicker than on PCs. Chrome, again, leads the way here with an average load time of 2.5 seconds. Safari isn't far behind at 2.7 seconds, followed by Firefox's 2.8 seconds.
But how is the performance tracker arriving at these results? Numbers. Lots of numbers, courtesy of its Real User Monitoring system.
"We are currently monitoring about 750 million page views a day, 5 billion a week and 20 billion a month for 20,000 active accounts," the site explained. "Our real user monitoring Javascript is found on over 150,000 unique domains on the internet. This puts us in the unique position of being able to comment credibly on the state of web performance from the end user perspective."
New Relic claims browsing speeds across the board have improved, with an average of .5 seconds shaved since 2011.
