Stephane Kimmerlin, product marketing director, Windows client business group, Asia-Pacific, Microsoft, said during a press demonstration of IE8 beta 2 that the browser's important features were user-interface enhancements, aimed at automating some common actions for users.

Performance benchmarking, such as the speed of loading pages, was a secondary priority in comparison, he said.

"When we designed IE8, we did not start with performance in mind," said Kimmerlin, in response to a question on the speed of IE8's Javascript engine.

Nick Wong, platform strategy advisor, developer and platform evangelism, at Microsoft added: "It is about how discernable the [speed] difference is [between different Javascript engines]... IE8 reloads pages faster and responds quickly."

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