Are you using the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser to access Office Live workspace? Over the past few months we’ve received feedback from some users regarding performance issues when using Office Live Workspace on IE6. Thanks to all of you who provided this feedback! From what we heard in the forums and elsewhere, we learned customers were experiencing extremely slow performance loading Office Live Workspace in IE6 and, in some cases, IE6 would hang. This is obviously an unacceptable experience so we have been working hard to find a solution.
Note: For you technically adroit dll-savvy programmer types out there, read on to hear the fascinating things we uncovered as we tackled this issue. The bottom line for everyone else: Upgrade to IE7 (free, by the way) for the easiest way to solve the issue.
The glorious details
We had been looking at this issue for some time, but it was difficult to reproduce. Saurabh, one of our developers (formerly on the IE team) finally succeeded. The issue boils down to a problem with how IE6 handles the display of transparent images–specifically the kind of images used in the “Getting Started” panel in OLW. The technical explanation is that there are sporadic deadlocking issues with the IE6 AlphaImageLoader CSS filter used to render transparent PNG images on the page.
Analysis of the problem was slippery because the slowness was not evident for any of the following conditions:
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If the images in question were being retrieved from the user’s browser cache
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If the Getting Started area on the page was closed
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If the user’s machine was using an Internet connection that was relatively fast
If the user was coming to the service from a fast connection, the file downloaded quickly enough for the filter to be applied without deadlocking. Similarly if the images were already cached, they rendered fast enough to avoid this problem.
The solution
Once we determined the steps, we were quite appalled at how poor the performance was. Within a day, our site management team updated all the images to GIF and PNG8 format to prevent this from affecting any more users. We noticed, however, that on some IE6 machines the performance was still poor and the browser process utilization would periodically spike up to 100%. Further investigation led to identifying the culprit as the older version (5.6) of jscript.dll that shipped with IE6 in 2001. Installing the newer 5.7 version of this dll made the process a lot faster.
If you are still noticing performance issues using IE6 browser, here are a couple of options to boost your Office Live experience:
Option 1) Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7
Option 2) If you do not want to install IE7 yet, you can download the Windows Script 5.7 for Windows XP package. (Full details of the jscript.dll fix are listed in this article.)