IE dev team taunts Apple with Win8/iOS performance comparison

Reports emerged this morning about a potential public beta of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, with journalists having received invites to a ‘Consumer Preview’ at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona later this month. If the next big Windows iteration really is this close, it might explain some of the grandstanding that’s been going on over at the Internet Explorer dev team’s official blog lately.

Writing on Tuesday, senior program manager Andy Zeigler used the veneer of a post titled “High performance HTML5 content in Metro-style apps” to slam the performance web content in native iOS apps. Having explained how the IE10 engine in Windows 8 JIT-compiles and hardware-accelerates web content, he goes on to taunt Apple:

Cocoa apps on iOS offer significantly worse JavaScript performance (via the UIWebView control) than the same content running in Safari. These Cocoa apps do not enjoy JIT compilation, and these apps cannot show and use Web content the same way the browser on the system can.

His claims are backed up by a benchmark chart which seems to have been designed specifically to make iOS look bad, including a dummies-guide label hammering home the point that “Web content in an iOS app is over 3x slower than in Safari.” It even shoots itself in the foot by including a column showing that web content in native Kindle Fire apps outperforms everything else, including IE10.

As one commentator eloquently notes, “What is the point of this blog post?”