Steve Souders measures IE 8 page load time improvements

From: High Performance Web Sites :: IE8 speeds things up.

Lots of attention has been focused on the JScript improvements in IE8, but Steve "YSlow" Souders has measured the improvements to page load time based on the new 6 connections per host rule.  The other effect measured is the way IE will now download scripts in parallel, but the execute them sequentially, which unblocks the rest of the page load during large script downloads.

The image shows that scripts are actually downloading in parallel, and that more than two are downloading at once.  Awesome!

Steve writes:

Increasing parallel downloads makes pages load faster. (For users with slower CPUs or Internet connections it could possibly be worse, but for most users it’s faster.) The HTTP 1.1 spec recommends that browsers only download two items in parallel per hostname, but the spec was written in 1999. Today’s clients and servers can support more parallel downloads, so IE8 has increased the number of downloads per hostname from 2 to 6.

What Steve does not mention is that users with slower connections will automatically be defaulted to two connections per host, which will alleviate the original worry of the W3C in suggesting two as the limit.

I can't wait to measure the improvement for SkyDrive in page load time between IE7 and IE8.  Future post maybe?