Microsoft ran a benchmarking comparison for their mobile version of Internet Explorer 9 on an IE-approved website and the results were either entirely predictable or quite surprising depending on which tech camp you fall in to. Plus, an interview with the Twitter co-founder you may not have heard of.
Microsoft wins benchmark, but is it a fair fight?
Windows Phone 7 will receive a major update this fall and a large part of that update will be the inclusion of a mobile Internet Explorer 9 for all of your Windows Phone 7 web browsing.
But yesterday, well in advance of its fall release, Microsoft ran some benchmarking tests using an Internet Explorer spec test site to compare this beta Windows Phone 7 to an Android browser on the Nexus S and iOS on the iPhone 4.
As VentureBeat reports, the Windows Phone 7 handily dismissed its competition. There is even video proof of the iPhone 4 gimping along during the speed test, finishing dead last at roughly 2 frames per second while the WP7 took home the gold at 20 FPS and the Nexus S followed at 11 FPS.
What does it all mean? Well, that all depends on how you read the tea leaves. As VentureBeat points out, the WP7 has some solid support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration and the IE9 browser is competing against technology that’s already been released, not to mention the speed test was optimized for Internet Explorer.
But still, that’s a pretty nice head start for Microsoft and the accompanying video convincingly suggests that their stay in the smartphone market isn’t just for laughs. And if nothing else, it’ll cause the sort of exciting hand wringing on all sides of the tech aisles which is sort of fun to watch in a schadenfreude kinda way.
Noah Glass, not really gone but sort of forgotten, speaks
I love Twitter, and it has pulled into pole position for my go-to time killer/breaking news source. However, I couldn’t tell you much about its history. But just because they haven’t made a movie out of the saga yet doesn’t mean we can’t all learn a thing or two.
Like, for instance, that Noah Glass was one of the company’s original co-founders but was pushed out back in 2006 and missed out almost entirely on the growth of something he was a major part of! Now that’s history. Business Insider has an excellent interview with Glass where he talks about Twitter’s original story and his own role in it, as well as feeling betrayed and left out of an idea that he had a large part in.
It is an excellent read if you want to learn a little bit about the source you spend all day checking on your smartphone, or if you just want some tech gossip to rival the Zuckerberg tales you may have watched in a theater a few months ago.
