Newer IE versions found to be dramatically more reliable
Sauce Labs' 55 million tests of Web pages and apps find Microsoft's browser the most crash-prone, but IE10's error rate is a sixth that of IE6.
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Microsoft is making progress revamping Internet Explorer to shuck its bad reputation among Web developers, newly released measurements of browser reliability show.
Sauce Labs' Selenium service has run 55 million automated tests of Web sites and Web apps over the years, and the company kept track of the results. Although IE was the worst performer overall, newer versions show much lower rates of troubles bad enough to crash the browser, according to a Sauce Labs blog post Tuesday.
Overall, IE's error rate was 0.25 percent. But that's largely because of IE6's 0.31 percent rate and IE7's 0.29 percent rate. IE8 dropped to 0.22 percent, IE9 to 0.1 percent, and the latest halves that again.
"Microsoft has been so good at squashing their historically high error rates that IE 10 has an impressive 0.05 percent error rate," Sauce Labs' Lauren Nguyen said.
Comparing the latest versions of major desktop browsers, Safari 6 is the worst, with a 0.2 percent error rate. Next comes Opera 12 at 0.08 percent, then IE10. "Chrome 27 and Firefox 22 have virtually nonexistent error rates," Nguyen said.
Sauce Labs offers automated testing to developers who don't want the hassle of maintaining test machines for many combinations of browsers and operating systems.