Hi.
I’m a little new to this, so just taking my first steps into browser performance. I’ve noticed a significant performance hit when running in IE7 instead of IE8. When running the test’s I noticed on repeat view that IE7 includes an extra set of requests to retrieve images and css files that are not requested in IE8. This seems to make up the time difference. Is there any reason why IE7 would make additional calls like this?
Thanks.
There are huge differences between IE7 and IE8 and it is completely expected. IE8 bumped the number of parallel connections per domain up from 2 to 6 and it also introduced non-blocking script loading.
As far as the additional requests go, there are a lot of possible reasons:
1 - There could be a conditional comment in the code that loads a different style sheet for < IE 8
2 - There could be server-side user-agent detection that treats IE 7 differently