According to the bloggers and abench mark test conducted recently, Microsoft's IE 8 browser was declared thefastest browser with 12 sites.

A white paper published recently, byMicrosoft based on benchmark testing conducted in a Microsoft lab, states thatin a ‘real world’ test on browser speeds, Microsoft's team compared theperformance of IE 8 (currently available as Release Candidate 1), Google Chrome1.0 and Mozilla Firefox 3.05.

Microsoft has made available a videoon the study as well as a whitepaper, "Measuring Browser Performance:Understanding Issues in Benchmarking and Performance Analysis".

Microsoft used 25 popular Web sites,based on a comScore ranking, for benchmark.

The results clearly showed that IE 8was the fastest browser at 12 sites, followed by Chrome (nine sites) andFirefox (four sites).

Microsoft also added that inaddition to the exceptional page load performance, Internet Explorer 8 is alsooptimised to speed up the things that many users do day in and day out such asmapping an address, emailing links to friends, checking the weather, monitoringeBay auctions, etc.

Internet Explorer 8 can performthese tasks using anywhere from 10-50% fewer steps than other browsers.