Affects: IE7, IE8
Update: It is well known that addon/extensions slow down IE. Disable any that are not required. In particular, MS Research is very slow and not needed.
Note: IE is still extremely slow after disabling addons, but the speed will improve.
Status: Microsoft has confirmed this will NOT be fixed in IE8 RTM
Normally the bugs posted on here deal with the content served up to the browser in HTML, CSS & JavaScript.
However Today's bug is about opening a new Tab in IE7/IE8, and the fact that it takes a V-E-R-Y long time (read:unacceptable), while "Connecting..."
Now we would be okay with the slowness if it were downloading something complex like the Digg or Slashdot, front page... but this happens opening the "about:blank" page!
For those unaware, the HTML code for the "about:blank" page is listed below.
"about:blank" HTML:
<html></html>
(That's it folks! No JavaScript!, No CSS!, No Head!, No Body!, Nada, Zip, Zilch!)
What is really frustrating with this, is that it seems to lock up resources while loading thus making it very hard to do anything else while the new tab is loading.
The final blow comes when you are opening the new tab, to paste in a new URL. If you paste it in reasonably quickly, it will kind of get there, but then get overwritten with "about:blank"... and IE can't load the page so you need to re-select the URL and re-paste it in to get to the site you wanted.
Usability is apparently one of the key objectives in IE8, so lets hope that this gets fixed before IE goes RTM. ;-)
Addition: By default in IE8 Beta 2, the "about:Tabs" page appears for a new tab, with a collection of additional items/options. This page is very slow also, but setting it to use "about:blank" doesn't speed things up.
Known Workarounds: None.
Related Issues: None.
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