One of the most popular features in Opera and Firefox is the ability to use HTTP Pipelining to speed up web browsing, and I was just wondering how much you all would like to have this feature in IE 8... I have a friend who is a IE 8 technical beta tester who posted a suggestion to add Pipelining to IE 8, and I'm just wondering if you guys would like this feature in IE 8 as well and if any of you would want to give the suggestion post on connect a 5 star rating to help it gain support and momentum and hopefully get it added to IE 8. Let me know if any of you are interesting in having Pipelining added to IE 8 as much as I do.

you can't have proper pipelining for HTTP connections, if you simply mean having multiple connections to a server at once then hasn't IE had this for some time?

Why can't IE have proper HTTP Pipelining connections and Firefox and Opera can?

I didn't say Firefox/Opera can and IE can't I said HTTP isn't able to properly pipeline. Pipelining involves using a single connection to send multiple requests before the first is properly replied to.

I don't see any option in Opera referring to pipelining, only thing I can see that may be what you mean is using multiple connections to a server at once, and as i said in my first reply, from what I know IE has done this for some time

So what do all these settings mean in Firefox?:



Anyone else care to chime in?

It means it will re-use HTTP connections.

Normally you connect, download a resource, and disconnect, not the most efficient option. If you enable pipelining (and in that screenshot set it to 4), You connect, download a resource, request another resource, download it (4 requests per connection), then disconnect. And if you can have multiple connections to a server (say, 8 connections), you can have 8 separate connections downloading 4 objects per connection (so 32 objects with those 8 connections)

Still not very efficient, but more efficient than a single connection for each object.

And that's assuming the server supports it, I think IIS either doesn't support it, or does it with bugs (although I hope they've fixed it)

So would any Connect users vote for it and give it a 5 star rating (I'm sure MS knows all these facts)?

Because Microsoft made it? I don't think pipelining is top priorty for IE8 since they have other stuff to include in the browser like getting standards support and stuff users will see.

IE isn't slow because of the lack of "proper" pipelining. It's slow in rendering, especially JS. They're working on that, I believe, though.

from what I understand pipelining is basically keepalive http connections, and if I understand correctly if you enable http 1.1 in IE then you also use pipelining.

I'd like to see CSS support in IE 8.