Our application is a responsive (bootstrap) asp.net (winforms) intranet application. Some of the pages contain javascript and are considerably less responsive (in terms of speed) on ie8 (obviously) verses chrome and firefox. (Whilst running via a normal desktop pc). However the application is acceptibly responsive to user input
However when the application runs on ie8 via a thin client pc (running a citrix client), the speed is considerably slower again, and the cpu usage of the iexplore.exe is averaging 33% after the page has loaded and no mouse iteraction with the page in question is occurring. This page has no videos or gifs running and the only javascript which is running should be eventhandlers awaiting for interaction.
Are there any pointers on things to look into or avoid when designing a web application for thin client responsiveness? Is it possible that excessive repainting of the page is ocurring? Unfortunately i always find the dev tools in ie8 seem to make the job of trying to indentity issues with ie8 even more difficult, verses chrome or firefox devtools.
This is perhaps not a solution, but a workaround in some cases. I have the same problem with IE8 on the Citrix server and with no other browsers available. I then thought perhaps a portable browser would do the job...and tested Firefox Portable
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
It works perfectly!