Where Does IE Spend Most Time When Loading a Page?

Jason Weber, Lead Program Manager responsible for Internet Explorer Performance, has released some internal data showing where IE 8 spends most of its time while preparing a page then rendering it, suggesting what websites should be focusing on.

According to Weber, Internet Explorer contains 11 subsystems starting with Networking and ending with Rendering:

1. Networking – responsible for communication with the server. It includes services like caching the web content.
2. HTML – responsible for parsing the HTML document and creating the DOM. There are similar subsystems for XML, XHTML and SVG documents.
3. CSS – parsing CSS style and creating a structural representation of it for later use.
4. Collections – responsible for storing and accessing HTML metadata.
5. JavaScript – executes the scripts.
6. Marshalling – represents the layer of communication between the browser and the JavaScript engine.
7. Native OM – the JavaScript engine accesses the HTML document through the DOM API contained by this subsystem.
8. Formatting – Applies styles to each document component.
9. Block Building – Each component of the document receives a rectangular block that will be rendered after being layout.
10. Layout – Responsible for laying out all the blocks.
11. Rendering – Responsible for the final stage of page loading when all the blocks are drawn onto the screen.

Microsoft has tested IE 8 against 5 major news sites and another 25 AJAX-heavily sites in order to see where the browser spends most of its time when loading a page.

Read more: InfoQ

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