Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is a web browser developed by Microsoft in the Internet Explorer browser series, released on March 19, 2009. That's over 4.5 years ago... or 9 web years. A long time in web terms. So much has changed since then. As of September 2013, estimates of IE8's global market share ranged from only 6.93% percent to 8.73% percent. Demonstrating that it's not been 'held on to' by very many people at all. I am surprised it is even that high.
The web community has loathed IE right from IE6.
IE6 was so bad that IE7 was released as a Security Patch to IE6. A forced upgrade with a faux makeover and mainly there to plug the security holes that IE6 was riddled with. IE7 was behind the times before it was even 6months old and IE8 was a very welcome restbite from the disasters of IE6&IE7.
One of the reasons IE8 was still a pain though, is speed.
Even just after its launch, on April 2nd 2009, Mark Joseph Edwards wrote in the newsletter Windows Secrets that IE8 had greatly improved security, speed and compatibility from IE7, but opined that it still lagged behind competitors in all three areas. Edwards noted that at the time Internet Explorer 8 was still underperforming relative to other browsers in speed and was not as successful in displaying webpages as they were intended to display as such browsers as Firefox and Opera.
Even when it was new, it was considered slow. And, it has little quirks like the use of BASE tags (which is fairly standard to set) will slow it up: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973536
Speed was a key concern of Microsoft when going from IE8->IE9. The difference between IE8 and IE9 (mainly speed) is highlighted in these articles:
"It's [IE9] a huge advance from the Internet Explorers of the past in terms of speed, trimmed down interface, and HTML5 support."
Bearing in mind that Firefox, Chrome and Safari are, by now streaks ahead in terms of these elements (security, speed and compatibility). Microsoft manages to get IE9 out and it was a great improvement. We can see that clearly demonstrated on the many recent client websites. However, Microsoft's focus was already on IE10 because that would be the Browser for Windows8 - their new flagship launch. So, IE9 was a massive improvement - but more down to the fact that IE7 and IE8 were so utterly bad - - and not due to IE9 being that great at all.
One of the key reasons that IE8 appears to be even slower than it genuinely is, is because it doesn't load the stylesheets and JavaScript before rendering some HTML. With smaller sites of 2008/9, this wasn't such an issue and designers and developers were still mildly cautious in terms of file sizes, javascript libraries and image/video usage.
With modern, video/image heavy sites, animation, large JavaScript and CSS files (because nearly everyone has broadband - - - and will have mobile broadband soon) IE8 struggles to process all that information and the user gets this nasty ('broken') look of a web page before it then 're-draws' the page with the correct styles etc. The browser is doing double the work (draw... think... re-draw), taking ages to process all the code and it's not coping.
To give an analogy, if every web-year is 6 months in real-time, we are looking at a badly built Lada Car (IE8) build in 2004 and expecting it to have all the speed, security, safety and fuel efficiency features of a brand new dual-fuel Audi (Chrome/Safari).
I really hope that explains it.... now upgrade to IE10.... or get Chrome... please!
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