IE8 performance improvements
Steve Souders wrote some thoughts on performance improvements happening in IE8, with their change to support 6 parallel downloads from the same hostname at the same time.
Previously IE would download and execute the JavaScript files in sequence, to make sure that no changes to the DOM would happen in the wrong order. Now IE8 downloads all script files in parallel (up to the new limit of 6 downloads at a time), and then will execute them in sequence.
According to Steve, there’s a big difference for some sites. Facebook for instance takes a 80% performance gain while using IE8 and having an empty cache.
By the way, I didn’t know Steve had a blog — Subscribed.
