IE 6 vs 7 vs 8 using dial-up internet access

Factual Questions
1

When IE7 first came out I upgraded to it from IE6 but found that dial-up internet access went from painfully slow to excruciatingly painfully slow, so I reverted back to IE6.

Some websites are now giving me warnings that I am using IE6 and my banking website won’t even accept IE6 anymore…

Has anyone used IE8 with dial-up and how slow was it relative to IE6?

The reason I ask is that now I am on a 30 day trial of broadband with dial-up as a backup.

I’m not 100% sure I’m keeping broadband (I’m very seldomly on-line at home ((about once per week)) and after 6 months the broadband costs $25.00 /month vs dial-up is free) and if I do keep broadband I would still need to use dial-up in case of unresolved broadband technical difficulties.

In the event I upgrade to IE8, wind up reverting back to dial-up and IE8 proves too slow, would it be easy to revert to IE6?

2

I have used IE6-8 and they all are slow on dial up, but not excruciatingly slow. I think you have a connection problem. You are not getting what you think in speed. You should use the Leslie test page to confirm the speed of your connection. But in any case, you should use Firefox on dial up with the “No Script” add on to remove the bloat of web pages unless you need the content.

3

I hope nobody interprets this as threadshitting but… try Chrome. It’s about 20x faster than any IE version (ETA: or Firefox) I’ve ever used, with or without broadband.

4

The dialup part has nothing to do with it. IE6 was just a leaner browser. IE7 and 8 both are resource hogging messes. Granted, you can’t tell on more modern computers, but you indicate that you don’t really have one. This also likely rules out IE9 for you, which has been optimized for speed.

If you are worried about speed, you probably need to use another browser. Chrome is pretty fast, but http://www.opera.com/ really shines on older computers.

(Firefox has gotten fast, but it’s like IE9–it’s only faster than other browsers on newer computers. Though if anyone has a faster computer, I do recommend you try the latest Firefox and compare it to Chrome.)

5

I’ve got a pretty fast low-end laptop - 4Gb RAM, dual core etc. - and for me both Firefox and IE8 are sloths compared to Chrome.

6

Second the recommendation to use some form of JavaScript blocker, that’ll help speed up a modem connection on most sites.

The slowdown between IE6 and IE7 seems more due to your computer than to anything about dial-up. IE7 (and IE8) simply consume more resources. You have a few options:

  1. Move to a non-IE browser. Firefox, Chrome, Opera-- all of those are a better option than IE8, and definitely a better option than IE6-- and can block automatic JavaScript execution.

  2. Upgrade all the way up to IE9, which fixes all the bloat issues with previous versions of IE and is really close to be on-par with Chrome, speed-wise.

Since you mentioned IE7 being sluggish, and stopped at IE8, it also seems like you’re probably running some really old hardware with a really old OS. It might be time to consider an upgrade, or at least wiping and re-installing your computer.

7

“Pentium 4” 3.4 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM running Windows XP SP3.

Would that be considered “really old hardware with a really old OS?” :dubious:

8

Huh. I’ve seen speed tests that say otherwise about Firefox 7 and above. Perhaps that’s only in certain circumstances or on certain hardware.

Then again, if Chrome has gotten significantly faster in the past few months, that would also work.

Note that I’m not talking about startup time or shutdown time here, just speed once they are loaded.

9

Windows XP is ten years old, so as OS’s go, yes it is “really old.” You won’t be able to run IE9 on XP. IE9 uses Direct2D which isn’t available on XP. IE8 is as high as you could go unless you upgrade to Windows 7.

10

I necessarily factor those things in too, to be honest: speed to launch, speed of opening new tabs/windows, responsiveness to keyboard shortcuts, as well as page render time. If you just measure rendering time then I’m sure IE8 is fine, but it’s all the other things that make the difference between usable and otherwise, IMO.

11

The Pentium 4 is rather old, too: about 7 or 8 years old. My dad’s eMachine (budget machines) is about 5 times as fast on the CPU alone. Granted, non-dual core netbooks are still slower, but that’s it.

(and you can run IE9 in Vista, but I’m not sure why you’d want to. Get Vista, that is. The only way I’d use it is if I got it on a preowned computer for less than $100.)

12

Wow, and I thought my 486 PC @ 25MHz with 8 MB of RAM was still a spring chicken! :smack:

13

Several people have said this, but it’s not a given.

IE6 is old enough that whatever site you’re visiting might be sending you a stripped-down page with no bells or whistles that is much smaller than the full-featured one that’s sent to more modern browsers. So it could be that the site is slower with a new browser because the page you’re getting is actually larger.

I agree with everyone else to try out a recent version of Firefox or Chrome. In my experience, Chrome is faster, but that’s going to depend somewhat on usage and hardware, and both of them are likely to be better than IE7 or IE8.

14

Why the sarcasm? You asked if your hardware is considered really old. I answered.

15

So sorry, no sarcasm intended. I really do have a 486 @ 25 MHz.

My inentet was just to make fun of myself–sorry if that was taken by anyone any other way.