Forum Discussion
Internet Explorer 11 performance with SPFx
Internet Explorer 11 is still the standard operating environment for many companies which makes the pages with multiple SPFx webparts really slow.
Each SPFx webpart by design adds at least 4 cached http requests ( webpart bundle JS file + few other JS libraries like jQuery, Angular & PnP JS ) + Rest/CSOM API for the webpart logic.
While all modern browsers can handle that peacefully, IE 11 can't!
For a page with 6 SPFx webparts ( ideal home page with multiple tiles ) the resulting number of requests is around 40 ( mostly from browser cache ), again for all modern browsers this loads in less than 2 seconds but for IE11, it takes around 5 seconds, which is not acceptable.
Possible solutions:
1 - Bundle webparts JS files but this is not possible for SPFx 1.1 ( on premise SharePoint 2016 ).
2 - Bundle Vendor JS files, while it may be possible to bundle the Vendor JS files but how to configure SPFx to load vendors JS files from common bundle rather than doing separate cached http request for each library.
I am wondering if there is any other way to improve the performance of SPFx pages on IE 11.
Yeah, the same experience with us. SPFx extension works great on Chrome, slows down the process in IE11. We are recommending users to use Chrome.
Well .. I am glad that I am not alone :)
for big companies, recommending Chrome is not an option as there are many legacy applications that works only in IE. I have noticed as well that the performance is even worst in IE 11 on windows 7 than IE 11 in windows 10 and unfortunately windows 7/IE 11 is the standard operating environment.
We are also seeing this issue and I set the blame on our Network group and must now humble myself. After networking at a SharePoint conference I found that many organizations are seeing inconsistent slowness with the IE browser. My organization had put in a ticket for this issue to Microsoft but all they wanted was fiddler traces which is hard to plan because this is so inconsistent. It seems this is another one of the "known issues" that Microsoft is not "transparent" about.
Have you tried checking whether the browser is caching the files correctly? Is something, e.g. cache control settings, causing it to reload these every time?
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I confirm that caching is done correctly by Internet Explorer by analysing HTTP traffic over Fiddler.
To give a better idea about current setup, we have a SharePoint 2016 environment with home page which contains 9 SPFx webparts.
