Microsoft rolls out Holiday Lites browser benchmarking tool, puts Chrome to shame

For those of you who use Google Chrome as their internet browser, Microsoft has rolled out a new benchmarking tool just in time for the holidays to put your browser to shame. This tool is called Holiday Lites and if you can achieve a score of two seconds or less, then you are in the same league as Internet Explorer 11. In comparison, Google Chrome 31 gave us a score of 18.63 seconds – compared to IE11’s 2 seconds.

“In the spirit of the season, we wanted to share some GPU-powered HTML5 and CSS3 holiday cheer. Check out Holiday Lites to brighten your screen and test your browser’s layout and rendering performance. This demo shows how IE11 updates content incrementally rather than needing to layout and render the entire page after every DOM manipulation. It uses a broad range of technologies including HTML5, CSS3, Border-Image, Flexbox, MP3 Audio, Power Efficient timers, and more,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.

Microsoft continues to tout Internet Explorer 11, the company’s latest web browser, as being 30% faster for real-world websites. IE11 comes packed with touch improvements, along with security, networking, and editing improvements. On top of mentioning IE11’s awesomeness, Microsoft also wished everyone who uses IE11 a “Happy Hardware-accelerated Holiday Season.”

“Today we want to say thank you to everyone who browses the Web with Windows 8.1, is using IE11, runs the test drives, and shares your feedback with the IE team. We also want to thank the people and groups who make the standards process work, the broad community of Web developers, and enthusiastic consumers who work to move the Web forward,” Microsoft stated.

You can check out the benchmark at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/HolidayLites/. What score did you get and what browser did you use?