DOJO very slow with IE6

Question

Hi There,

I am using Dojo JS libraries in my project. The application runs on IE 6/7/8 and FireFox.

The application is working with a normal response time in IE7 and above and Firefox.

My Problem is

*When i run the application in IE6 , the page gets loaded very slow (takes upto 2 minutes).

I get errors like this :-

could not load dijit.form.button or could not load dijit.editor last tried ../Editor.js

But for the subsequent refreshes it works normally. Is this behavior because , the IE6 takes time to download the dojo scripts initially and for the next time it uses them from the cache.

Thanks! Pratik

Answer 1

I've also experienced this. Internet Explorer 6 has a much slower JavaScript interpreter than other modern browsers, which we can't change.

I think your first-load hit is caused by fresh requests for all of the source files as the Dojo parser bootstraps.

As Peller stated, a custom build script, containing source for only the objects you need can reduce the number of network requests needed to bootstrap Dojo.

This alleviated some of our performance issues, but even on subsequent refreshes we noticed IE6 taking substantially longer than IE7+, FF, Chrome, etc. to render the widget controls.

To try to reduce this, you can try to refactor large pages with many widgets into multiple smaller pages with fewer widgets. Can you convert any large monolithic forms into smaller step-by-step wizards?

You can try to encourage your users to upgrade to a newer browser.