Comment Feed for IE7 Performance (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: IE7 Performance

W3bbo — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:55:02 GMT

zzzxtreme wrote:
FF is one of the slowest browser for non-cache rendering, javascript, DOM, etc.. many features in FF , IE6 and IE7 was copied from Opera Opera has long included zoom features, RSS detection. Opera 9 beta includes bittorrent support. very neat. its been ad-free for months. many benchmarks was done and Opera is still the fastest in Windows and Linux environment.

Moderated -1: Troll/Flamebait

Either that or you're seriously talking out of your rear-end.

First of, don't ressurect dead threads.

And now for the dissection:

a) What is "non-cache rendering"?
b) how can a browser be "slow for [...] DOM"? The DOM is just a collection of objects in a scripting environment
c) IE6 and IE7 have nothing to do with Opera (which is vastly superior to IE7 anyway)
d) Old news, why don't you email Dave Massy or Bruce Morgan directly and demand intrinstic bittorrent support?

Re: IE7 Performance

JonathonW — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:53:42 GMT

My one thing I have to say about IE's performance is:

Percieved performance matters too.

I've switched to Firefox because it seems to get me where I'm going faster than IE. A browser can render as fast as it wants, but if I don't see the webpage as soon as possible, it's going to look slow. Firefox starts rendering any page the moment it gets enough data to produce a reasonable representation. IE, on the other hand, waits until it has almost the entire page loaded before it renders the page for most sites. I want to be able to see what the site has to say before the whole page is loaded. Most likely, I don't care about what's at the end of the document anyways (copyright information, duplicate link bars, the rest of the article which I haven't even been able to start reading yet because the browser won't render it).

So, you say, why does this matter in the day and age of Broadband, 100Mbps connections? A large percentage of the world is still on dialup, or on a slow always on connection. Even if you're on a fast connection, you still have to deal with internet traffic and slow servers bringing your download rate down. No one wants to waste their time waiting on their web browser, and no real user is going to be timing the browser to see how long it spends laying out the page. What matters it how quickly the content is delivered to the user in a form that he/she can use it.

Re: IE7 Performance

me — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:36:11 GMT

i love ie6 - i have no idea why people cant "TAME" it ( = update it to be secure)

ie7 has not yet shown me one reason why i would WANT it

sorry but security supositories are just not a good UPgrade reason

*hint*

dude 1: "hey have you got the new IE?"
dude 2: "no - whats in it?"
dude 1: "it limits you by removing coolbars and adds a search bar"
dude 2: "thats ok - ill turn off the search bar - and move the address bar"
dude 1: "you cant"
dude 2: "so why would i want it?"

<perfect world>
dude 1: BECAUSE IT ONCE AGAIN TAKES COMPONENTIZATION TO A NEW LEVEL: AS PINONEERED BY BEN SLIVKA AND BRAD SILVERBERG AND CHRIS JONES - IE WAS THE FIRST COMPONENTIZED BROWSER - RIGHT DOWN TO THE TOOLBARS. NOW - IN IE7 - THEY ARE TAKING THIS TO THE NEXT LEVEL - IE ITSELF WILL BE COMPONENTISED - SO EVERY PIECE WILL BECOME DETACHABLE -
dude 2: "stop shouting - that sounds good - so i could have all the browser controls at the bottom of the ie window instead of the top - or... i could drag them out on to desktop to float - creating a floating viewer environment - or i could drag those toolbars - to the start bar task bar - which brings this ie idea to fruition - complete and utter integration - not STOPPING IT
dude 1: YEEESSS!!!!!!!

</perfect world>

hey dave massey - ..... you know....arg - bah - insert appropriate idea killer grunt here

Re: IE7 Performance

zzzxtreme — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:51:51 GMT

FF is one of the slowest browser for non-cache rendering, javascript, DOM, etc.. many features in FF , IE6 and IE7 was copied from Opera Opera has long included zoom features, RSS detection. Opera 9 beta includes bittorrent support. very neat. its been ad-free for months. many benchmarks was done and Opera is still the fastest in Windows and Linux environment.

Re: IE7 Performance

JonathonW — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 04:55:37 GMT

Cider wrote:

W3bbo wrote: The Microsoft UI team have probably been smoking a lot of crack recently, take the Office 2003 help system or the Access 2003 windowing system for example: proof that they care not for de-facto UI standards they declared themselves in the past.

Maybe the standard was, *gulp*, wrong. Have you ever thought of that? I like the Office 2003 interface and - especially - the way it does help with the bar on the right.

Stop whittering on that everything has to match a certain specified standard. You'll lead a boring life if you only ever do things by perscribed past standards. Most of the best things in life don't have a standard.

I think what he's referring to partly is the rule of "Click the ? button on the title bar and click any element on screen to get a popup describing that command." Now, not only do the ? buttons do what a "Help" button on the dialog should do (open the main help) but there is often NO description of the individual commands, which is probably why you clicked the button in the first place.

Re: IE7 Performance

Cider — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:05:56 GMT

W3bbo wrote:
The Microsoft UI team have probably been smoking a lot of crack recently, take the Office 2003 help system or the Access 2003 windowing system for example: proof that they care not for de-facto UI standards they declared themselves in the past.

Maybe the standard was, *gulp*, wrong. Have you ever thought of that? I like the Office 2003 interface and - especially - the way it does help with the bar on the right.

Stop whittering on that everything has to match a certain specified standard. You'll lead a boring life if you only ever do things by perscribed past standards. Most of the best things in life don't have a standard.

Re: IE7 Performance

Cider — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:00:35 GMT

Custa1200 wrote:
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

Well, for a start I would say that it is too early to really decide whether or not it is something that is possible for an internal network. However, I would add that I really don't see IE 7 on XP as something I would even entertain on a corporate network.

Simply, the reason is that it really offers nothing to the corporate body that can't already be done with IE 6, the IEAK and IE group policies. The only reason I would see it deployed anywhere is to developers who can then get a "feel" of how internal applications work on IE 7.

I really see IE 7 on XP as a stop-gap used when you have started to migrate across to Vista, you have all your internal apps tested for Vista and IE 7, and you wish to give your current XP users a stop-gap solution until they migrate. Strictly speaking, I would say that of all the Vista-backported-to-XP technologies.

Re: IE7 Performance

W3bbo — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 23:44:21 GMT

Custa1200 wrote:
I hope that was a joke coz they look nothing alike. the IE7 UI is moving in the wrong direction on many fronts to me. A couple of my biggest gripes are the seperation of the Forward/Back buttons and the Stop and Reload button. I feel those groups shhould be together so I always know where they are on the left. If you resize the window from fullscreen on any size you have to think and search for the reload and stop buttons. At least on previous version of other browsers you knew instictively where to find them all.

The Microsoft UI team have probably been smoking a lot of crack recently, take the Office 2003 help system or the Access 2003 windowing system for example: proof that they care not for de-facto UI standards they declared themselves in the past.

I also dislike the use of Vista-styled icons on Windows XP, it clashes. Even IE6-for-9x/2000 used the 9x-icons and toolbar button graphics (with the exception of the Internet Options panel icon). Is this too much to ask for with IE7?

Re: IE7 Performance

Custa1200 — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 23:07:51 GMT

pwzeus wrote:
it looks just like firefox

I hope that was a joke coz they look nothing alike. the IE7 UI is moving in the wrong direction on many fronts to me. A couple of my biggest gripes are the seperation of the Forward/Back buttons and the Stop and Reload button. I feel those groups shhould be together so I always know where they are on the left. If you resize the window from fullscreen on any size you have to think and search for the reload and stop buttons. At least on previous version of other browsers you knew instictively where to find them all.

Re: IE7 Performance

Manip — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:01:46 GMT

DMassy wrote:
Manip,
That's not quite accurate but you are close

Considering I made all that up based only on how both browsers load content that isn't too bad at all. :P

Re: IE7 Performance

DMassy — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:57:34 GMT

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 :)
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

Re: IE7 Performance

Manip — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:31:37 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

Badgerguy — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:55:06 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

blowdart — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:26:56 GMT

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 ...

Re: IE7 Performance

Christian Liensberger — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:22:59 GMT

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".

Re: IE7 Performance

blowdart — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:05:51 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

pwzeus — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:47:29 GMT

it looks just like firefox :(

Re: IE7 Performance

BruceMorgan — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:53:39 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

Custa1200 — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:28:52 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

JonathonW — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:44:45 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

Badgerguy — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:23:41 GMT

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!

Re: IE7 Performance

Badgerguy — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:20:50 GMT

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!

Re: IE7 Performance

Wells — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 19:39:58 GMT

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

Manip — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 18:30:27 GMT

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. :)

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.

Re: IE7 Performance

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 18:09:10 GMT

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.