IE7 Performance | The Coffeehouse

Badgerguy
Badgerguy

So, I've been playing around with IE7, using it to browse the net a bit this afternoon, and my verdict so far is that it's still not as fast as FireFox at page rendering.

This is actually most noticable here on Channel 9! Even when loading 'from the cache' - FireFox is allot quicker than IE7 at building the page onscreen.

Now, I realise of course, that IE7 is still in beta - but I must stress, that my only reason for favouring FireFox over IE is that it's quicker.

Tabbed browsing, secutiy and download management (notably absent in IE7) are nice but don't really matter a great deal to me - speed is the key. If the final release of IE7 improves in performance, then I'll be switching back, if not, FireFox will most likely remain my day-to-day browser.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

It's interesting to watch how the refresh happens. I have IE on my home PC, I'm Remote Desktoped into it

Now if I have an app maximimsed and then swap to IE what sometimes seems to happen is

Paint current document
Paint toolbar areas
Paint current document

Of course it's rare to actually catch the paint, but I've seen this a couple of ties now.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

This is weird. I don't see the rendering. I just click and the page is here. It's really fast.

BenZilla

Complete opposite for me, firefox is a sloooooooow browser.

Manip

The loading time on IE 7 is worse than IE 6 which is a big deal. In fact the loading times are almost as bad as Firefox's.

Page loading times are fine. But more importantly the focus shifts out of the search and address boxes when the page finishes loading.

RandyRants
RandyRants.com

I can't believe that people even care that a page loads in 1.1 seconds rather than 1.15 seconds.

*shrug*

GRiNSER
GRiNSER puts a smile on your face :)

in the future we will likely see browser benchmarks, right?
l33t 0wnz br0ws0r bench0r kidd1es...

Manip

RandyRants wrote:
I can't believe that people even care that a page loads in 1.1 seconds rather than 1.15 seconds.

*shrug*

I can... People, including me, want "instant" page loads and the nearer you can get to that dream the better.

It bugs me that this browser, and Firefox, don't load up next to instantly... There is no excuse for not doing so, I mean it isn't like there is any data over the wire slowing the browser down.

mVPstar
I'm white because I smelt an onion.

littleguru wrote:
This is weird. I don't see the rendering. I just click and the page is here. It's really fast.

Ditto.

I'm actually experiencing really fast page times. C9 is around the same as on IE6, but all the other websites I visit come instantly.

Just curious, what AV and antispyware solutions are you guys using along with IE7? I'm using OneCareLive and MS AntiSpyware.

DMassy
Driving!

Manip wrote:

RandyRants wrote: I can't believe that people even care that a page loads in 1.1 seconds rather than 1.15 seconds.

*shrug*

I can... People, including me, want "instant" page loads and the nearer you can get to that dream the better.

It bugs me that this browser, and Firefox, don't load up next to instantly... There is no excuse for not doing so, I mean it isn't like there is any data over the wire slowing the browser down.

I'll make sure our Program Manager looking at performance sees the feedback. We know we have more work to do in this area.
What is interesting about performance is people do not have the same experience in every circumstance. Some reports on the preview say it is faster and some people say it is slower Smiley

Thanks
-Dave

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

Thanks.

DMassy wrote:
Some reports on the preview say it is faster and some people say it is slower

It's faster on some things and slower on others.

Test Machine:

CPU: 600 MHz P3
RAM: 192 MB SDRAM at 100 MHz
Hard Drive: 40 GB at 5200 RPMs.
Toolbars: MSN Search Toolbar enabled

IE7 is faster on rendering some DHTML. For example, Live.com and the new Hotmail beta load faster. There are also times when it loads pages very rapidly.

However, under all circumstances - IE7 "lags" a bit. There's a very small, almosty impreceptable, delay before the UI responds. This gets worse, and is almost intolerable, when a large number of tabs are enabled and you're attempting to switch from a tab that's rendering a web page.

It would be faster to open a window in IE6 than to create a new tab when multiple tabs are open.

More significanrtlysignificantly, Firefox is faster. I have them both open side by side: switching a tab in Firefox is lightening fast. Switching tabs in IE7 is reminiscient of switching tabs with the MSN Toolbar... very slow. The screen doesn't flicker, but that's small comfort.

Bottom line is that I won't be using IE7 (at least on this machine) unless performance dramatically improves.

I'd like to see improved cache behavior, to the point where it challenges Opera. I'd also like a new Find - preferably similar to Firefox and "find as you type." They nailed that.

Manip

Let me just be clear in that case then - Page Loads are faster - Browser Loading times are slower (Time to homepage is still slow up to 8 seconds on a 3Ghz machine with 1GB of RAM, far more if it has to page some stuff to disk first) .

At least that's my experience thus far.

And please could you get someone to look at the focus shifting when pages complete loading. If you load up the browser and quickly click in the search box and start typing, when the home page finishes loading the focus will jump to the default control on the page.

Also the "Fast Scroller" (hold down scroll wheel) is broken on a lot of pages. It only works if the thing behind the cursor is the background, not if it is an 'object' on the page (e.g. The Channel 9 editing box). This might not sound like a but deal, except that on a lot of pages 'objects' are used to generate background content, meaning that on those pages the "Fast Scroller" is completely broken.

Oh and still no CTRL-A in the search and or address boxes. Smiley

But all in all I'm pretty happy with the new IE browser, bugs aside (And this is a beta after all). I *really* like the multiple home-page thing, that could come in handy.

Wells

For any IE devs, there was a bug I found in beta 1 that may still be there...

Basically the browser was taking longer and longer to startup. I took a look at Filemon and IE was making hundreds of attempts at creating a temporary file but the names it was trying (sequential numbers on the end) already existed so it was taking a long time to finally get a hit. It obviously wasn't cleaning up its temporary files.

This may have been fixed by now, but I thought I'd report it.

Badgerguy
Badgerguy

DMassy wrote:
I'll make sure our Program Manager looking at performance sees the feedback. We know we have more work to do in this area.
What is interesting about performance is people do not have the same experience in every circumstance. Some reports on the preview say it is faster and some people say it is slower
Thanks
-Dave

Thanks for that! I'd like to say regarding all the other changes and improvements in IE7 - I love it!

Badgerguy
Badgerguy

RandyRants wrote:
I can't believe that people even care that a page loads in 1.1 seconds rather than 1.15 seconds.

*shrug*

If it was just a mere 0.05 of a second - I wouldn't be able to notice it. However it's longer than that - it takes several seconds longer to load up the Channel 9 homepage for me - on a fairly new PC, that I pride myself on keeping well optimised and clean (in fact, it's company policy that I do so!).

It seems that people's mileage varys on this - but variable peformance is worthy of investigation, and it seems the IE team will get to know about our differing experinces - which I'm really pleased about!

CannotResolveSymbol
{insert caption here}

Why does IE keep running after the exception????? Windows doesn't end the process until the error report has been sent-- that doesn't make sense.

Custa1200
Havok13andaThird

In our corporate enviroment IE7 performance is terrible. I have an XP machine at home and it is not too bad. Certainly faster than here at work even though home is on a 1.5Mbit ADSL connection and work here is on a LAN. The next lot of comments relating to speed are from corp network and not from home.

I know there are a lot of systems between me and the net here at work so I am assuming that IE7 is not playing nicely with one of them. The systems range from Websense to Cisco's Application and Content Networking System Software. There are probably others I do not know about such as Firewall etc but those are the couple I do know about.

Also the way the page paints is also terrible. It seems to render a tableless/CSS layout in massive chunks requiring all the images to be downloaded first before displaying. Sites like Macromedia or the Australian NineMSN are a mess with noticeable rendering bugs. I am also getting flash not displaying. (maybe the latest flash plugin is required)
Javascript based menu's (ComponentArt) are also sluggish in IE7

These are just a couple of MASSIVE showstoppers here for our intenal network. I had high hopes with the CSS/HTML fixes that are coming that I could move our 1000 people company to IE7 when it is released for internal applications, but with what I have seen so far I would not even put the idea forward to management.

I hope the things get fixed, IE6 nor any other browsers have these issues.

BruceMorgan

That's why we do the Beta 2 Preview, to find these issues out before we do the broader Beta 2, then the final release.

The corporate network slowdown bug was intermittent in our RC testing for B2P, so we decided it wasn't a showstopper. It is, however, one of our top problems to fix.

The rendering chunkiness is probably part of the same transport layer problem. Our testing shows the rendering layer is simply sitting there waiting on more data, then boom it gets it and renders it rapidly, then goes back to waiting for it.

Try enabling / disabling autodiscovery and the proxy settings. This frequently cures the problem. Details on the B2P FAQ.

pwzeus

it looks just like firefox Sad

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

pwzeus wrote:
it looks just like firefox

Actually I wish they'd take the icon identifier in Firefox's search box idea. It would be nice to know what search was being used without having to bring up the menu.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

blowdart wrote:

pwzeus wrote: it looks just like firefox

Actually I wish they'd take the icon identifier in Firefox's search box idea. It would be nice to know what search was being used without having to bring up the menu.

Hmmm my search box shows the search engine's name in gray... "MSN Search".

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

littleguru wrote:
Hmmm my search box shows the search engine's name in gray... "MSN Search".

Oh, how strange, mine is just an empty box.

Now, if I could work out how to type a TAB in an HTML input box ...

Badgerguy
Badgerguy

BruceMorgan wrote:

Try enabling / disabling autodiscovery and the proxy settings. This frequently cures the problem. Details on the B2P FAQ.

Tried fiddling with those settings, and temporarily turned off the phishing filter - still seems slower than FireFox, which in itself would seem to suggest that it isn't down to how fast the computer is receiving the data.

If it isn't the way the pages are rendered, then perhaps it is something to do with the way that IE is requesting the page and the elements that make up that page.

Manip

Based only one what I have seen I believe I know why it appears to render faster in FF.

Firefox uses a 2-pass loading scheme, IE uses a 1-pass loading scheme.

Firefox will draw the top of the page once with less than the full set of data and then a second time when it has received everything (or just because it takes longer). IE on the other hand will wait until it can draw the entire page and then start rendering.

Which results in total page loading times being lower in IE but "time to display" being much lower in Firefox.

As you can see from above, people care MORE about "time to display" than they do about "total page loading times."

So why not download / render the first 10% of the page, and then the other 90%... If you implement it correctly you shouldn't even see it refresh, the user just needs to scroll down.

DMassy
Driving!

Manip wrote:

Based only one what I have seen I believe I know why it appears to render faster in FF.

Firefox uses a 2-pass loading scheme, IE uses a 1-pass loading scheme.

Firefox will draw the top of the page once with less than the full set of data and then a second time when it has received everything (or just because it takes longer). IE on the other hand will wait until it can draw the entire page and then start rendering.

Which results in total page loading times being lower in IE but "time to display" being much lower in Firefox.

As you can see from above, people care MORE about "time to display" than they do about "total page loading times."

So why not download / render the first 10% of the page, and then the other 90%... If you implement it correctly you shouldn't even see it refresh, the user just needs to scroll down.

Manip,
That's not quite accurate but you are close Smiley

If the page has tables and is not using table-layout:fixed then we wait to measure all the content of the table before that table starts to render. Without tables or if the table uses table-layout:fixed then we render the stuff as soon as we can. We certainly don't wait for the entire page to be loaded before we start rendering.
There's no change in how we do this for IE7.
Thanks
-Dave