| famousringo said: Although it's clear that the Internet Explorer team has done a very good job optimizing their software for that dusty old Tegra SoC, there are two reasons why IE on Surface might seem more performant than rival tablets: 1. It's rendering 1/4 of the pixels of a Nexus 10 or iPad 4. Of course pages will tend to render and scroll faster, since it's actually doing less work. Some pages will actually load higher-quality assets to high resolution displays, so they also take more time to transfer over the network as well as to render. 2. Microsoft knows that there won't be an RT device with less than 2GB of RAM out there, while other browsers need to be able to run on devices with as little as 256MB of RAM. So for example, IE can afford to load in all images on a page, while Safari and Chrome are designed to stream those assets as the user requests them in order to conserve memory. |
These are valid points. Unified specs is one of the few advantages Microsoft can count on for Windows RT, being late to the game and seeing the mistakes others made.
One has to wonder if the massive pixels are really necessary at this point though. Especially when looking at how Nexus 10 renders those pages and gives the user even less scree realestate than surface with 4X less pixels...
In terms of similar spec benchmarks, as someone that has used the iPad 2 for over a year and surface for a month(similar hardware specs minus the RAM), I can see that the Surface is quicker in almost every aspect. I do think that iPad has a major advantage in portrait mode when it comes to browsing just due to the form factor. I find the surface unusable in portrait...
