Maybe some of you have followed last year my performance-benchmarking endeavors for Siebel IP13 on Chrome, Firefox and IE11.
- A closer view on Siebel OpenUI performance, the Firefox – IE11 battle
- Dromaeo benchmarking – IE11, FF R31, Chrome R37 and Canary
- How deceiving SunSpider could be for Siebel OpenUI browser comparisons…
- OpenUI Rendering Performance: Dummy Toggle Applets to the Rescue
Which turned out that IE11 was miserable failing to match the performance from its rivals. Unfortunate, because still within enterprise environments it is a very common browser.
Because several larger customers have reported and escalated this issue, Microsoft has taken the glove. It has resulted in a (first) fix. Oracle released this week a document on My Oracle Support:
Complex view performance fixes for Microsoft Internet Explorer 11. (Doc ID 1944035.1)
The document explains:
Open UI uses name based querySelectors to render UI’s both in code written by Oracle and third parties. Name based querySelectors do not perform well in Internet Explorer 10 and 11 as compared with other browsers. Lag caused by slow performace is magnified in screens with complex applets, large list views and high number of applets. This can result in up to 30% performance degradation for complex views. This is related to poor performance of name based querySelectors in Internet Explorer, which are prevalent in the Siebel user interface for Open UI.
What this means:
Siebel OpenUI as we know uses the JQuery framework to make the application to work across browsers. Which is good. But in the “Siebel World”, the HTML generated is pretty dynamic and Siebel assigns values to element id’s which are not fixed, but like “s_1_1_53_0″. These can change when the UI changes after a compilation. So elements really cannot be selected by using GetElementById() which is common in web development. Instead we use a lot of JQuery selectors, to identify elements based on other attributes, often the class attribute.
The document mentions a possible 30% improvement. Although I have seen in my benchmarks that even in standard and straightforward Siebel views, IE11 was lagging FF and Chrome easily by 30%. For complexer views this quickly became a factor 2-3. So my hopes here are not that high.
But I have not laid my hands on the fix yet. It will take a bit more time to come to a real first conclusion. Nevertheless I am happy MS picked up the glove, but also hope that it will not stop here.
And apparently Microsoft is open to discuss with customers the option to backport the fix to IE10 as well. Not sure whether that be realistic or not. That said, still a large number of enterprise customers is stuck on IE10. So it would be a nice gesture from Microsoft.
The patch will likely become available per March patch update for Internet Explorer. Customers can request the hotfix in advance.
- Jeroen
