How to speed up application running time in IE7?

Question

We did an application using rails(2.3.4), ruby(1.8.2), MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery. This is handling minimum 6000 records. We showing those records detail in table. In the beginning Mozilla taking 2m to load the whole page. We did the cache, eager loading, indexes. Now Mozilla taking 25s to load the whole page. But IE-7 taking 1m30s to load the page.

We don't know why IE-7 taking too much of time.

1. Any one can help us to detect the running time in IE-7 and tell your guidelines to improve performance in IE-7.
2. Any add-on is available in IE7 to see the AJAX request time taken as like Firebug add on.

Answer 1

Use partial loading. Don't try to load the 6000 records at once, load them in smaller segments, when needed. Even 5 second loading is too long, not to mention the 25 seconds or 1m 30s.

Oh and yeah, IE 7's JS engine just sucks.

Answer 2

From Table Rendering - IE Blog :

When Internet Explorer encounters a table it measures all the content of the table before rendering so that it knows what the widths of the columns are to render the content correctly. On the other hand Firefox uses a different algorithm in that it renders the table contents progressively before it has all been passed.

You can improve performance by setting the CSS rule table-layout: fixed . The renderer will then calculate the layout based on the first row of the table.

Answer 3

IE7 is slow, there's no real way of getting around that basic fact.

I'm going to answer your second question (about debugging tools for IE7) because I don't think I can give any useful advice on your main point about actually speeding up IE7.

Any add-on is available in IE7 to see the AJAX request time taken as like Firebug add on.

The first thing to try is IE8 or IE9. These browsers have a Developer Tools window (accessible via F12, just like Firebug). It isn't as good as Firebug, but it does do quite a bit, and it is a useful debugging tool. It also has a feature which allows you to switch the browser into IE7-compatibility mode. The idea is that you can test IE7 from the relative comforts of IE8 or IE9.

The down side is that it isn't actually IE7. It's just a pretend ID7, and not a particularly good one at that. It may or may not replicate the speed issues you're having with IE7, and it certainly has known bugs and quirks of its own which don't appear either in a real IE7 or in IE8 in normal mode.

But all that said, it might be good enough for you to run some tests and get some answers.

A second suggestion might be to try Firebug Lite . This is a cut-down version of Firebug which runs as a bookmarklet in any browser (but generally IE). It doesn't have all the features of the full version of Firebug, because there's only so much you can do without writing a browser plug-in, but it does do a surprising amount. If nothing else, it does give you the console functions, which can be a life saver for debugging.

I hope that helps.