Launching


One of the biggest differences in Office 2011 is the noticeably faster launching speed. There are two types of launching for us to test: launch after Mac restart, and successive launch. Because Mac OS X optimizes repeated launches with caching, these two types of launches perform significantly different. Either way, however, 2011 is noticeably faster as you can see in Figure 2.


Figure 2: Launching Speeds
(shorter is faster)

It’s common for applications to do things that give the user the perception of faster launching. As such, MacTech tests end when you can actually start doing something in the application. That way, we’re measuring both the reality and the user perception.