I've noticed a significant performance difference in loading & sorting large data grids (200-500 rows) between the IE 6.0 and Firefox browsers. I can sort a large webgrid in Firefox within 1 second, whereas it can take 7+ seconds in IE.
Why is there such a difference, and is there a way that I can improve the speed of my webgrid performance in IE? Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Changing the way the grid is rendered it could change some of its behaviors
I have identified the same and found that setting the BrowserLevel = Auto instead of XML drastically improves the sorting/loading of the UWGrid in IE7. We only use Sorting on the Client so other methods were not really an option. We would see 1 second on Firefox vs 6 seconds in IE to sort 200 rows. Once we moved to BrowserLevel = Auto, then FF and IE were much closer in performance.
This unfortunately is something that applies to IE browsers in general and is not directly related to UltraWebGrid. IE6 in particular is very slow, IE7 is faster, but still very slow compared to FireFox.
You can find benchmarks here (generic benchmarks which kinda confirm your 6:1 ratio)
http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-vs-firefox-browser-speed
While there is no cure for this, I do have a suggestion - experimenting with Sorting on Server (with PostBack), Sorting via Ajax, etc. You can place the grid in the UpdatePanel, if you wish to take rid of the page screen refresh. This may have somewhat better results.
Hope this helps.