What actually makes Internet Explorer slower than Google Chrome?
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Microsoft had its own idea of what different web technologies like HTML and Javascript should do in the browser. This was fine when it was the most popular browser but quickly became annoying when Firefox and Chrome came along with their *gasp* universal standards. MS didn’t play ball, released updates extremely infrequently, which made IE a laughing stock and horrible experience for everyone involved from development to users.
Other answers talked about incompatibilities, but that’s not quite specifically about what’s going on inside that makes it slower, or how it got that way.
1) The kind of problem that makes a program run slower:
The technical explanation is super-complex, but imagine that when you load a website you get a list of instructions: what kind of lettering to use, what color to make the background, how much margin to put on the sides, and so on. This list is long, there are hundreds of small adjustments you can make. Suppose you program the web browser so that it keeps that list in alphabetical order, and whenever you want something you start at the first entry, and scan down every item until you find the one you want. But someone else makes theirs with an index for the first item with each letter. The first one, if you needs “font-style,” just has to start at “a” and scan all the items until it finds that. The second can start directly at “f”, so it will be a lot faster. This isn’t exactly the problem inside IE, about which I have no special information, but you can see that this kind of thing can make a program run slower.
2) How it got that way.
When Microsoft acquired IE from Spyglass, they poured lots of resources into improving it. They had a small portion of the browser market and wanted to expand it. Eventually, IE was far and away the most-used browser, after which the company directors reallocated manpower to other things. The goal was never to make the best software, the goal was to make the most-used software. Once they had got there, they considered the job done, and stopped bothering to update IE or make it work better.
Google is in a different situation: Google Docs (for example) requires a web browser that works right; it’s absolutely fundamental to their entire business model that everyone have a browser that’s fast and as bug-free as possible. So while MS’s executives could shrug about improvements “We have the most-used browser, that’s all we care about, we shouldn’t pour resources into something that doesn’t make us any money,” Google’s execs can’t take that attitude.
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