IE Blog Tries to Make Case for Metro-Style Apps

A recent blog post by the IE development team has generated a lot of buzz by comparing the application performance between Safari, iOS App, IE10, Win8 App (developer preview), Kindle Fire browser, and a Kindle Fire App. 

Testing configuration: http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html.
iPad: 1st Gen, iOS 5.0.1.
Windows 8: Developer Preview, Dell Optiplex 745, 64-bit OS.
Kindle Fire v1.

This comparison seems more aimed at highlighting the slower performance of web content in a native iOS app (the dummies guide label seems a tad unnecessary) than championing the similar performance of Metro-Style apps to IE10:

Many applications embed HTML to provide a richer and always up to date experience for consumers. For example, the developer of a restaurant guide app might want to include a live map showing the locations of the list of restaurants the user is choosing from. If you write an app on iOS, common actions like panning and zooming the map will run twice as slow in an app compared with Safari.

-- Andy Zeigler, Senior Program Manager, Internet Explorer

But some folks are looking at it in a different light:

OK, we get it. Internet Explorer and Metro-style apps which use it are JIT compiled and hardware-accelerated. We have been hearing the same story for a year and a half now; IE has full hardware acceleration. Is there anything else in IE10 though in terms of features or is hardware acceleration the only thing to brag about.

-- Anon

Others feel that IE10 is simply moving in a predictable direction:

They're pointing out that they want to treat HTML5 applications as an acceptable method of creating an application for the platform and thus performance of their browser technology in this mode is important to them…Given the overheads of running inside a different environment, I'd say it's pretty damn impressive that they managed performance parity.

-- Richard

So ultimately, which is the best browser for HTML5 content?  Somewhat surprisingly, web content in native Kindle Fire apps outperformed all other browsers in this comparison. And according to a recent HTML5 Developer Scorecard series by Sencha, iOS5 is still the "gold standard".

So is Microsoft really making the point it wants here?