Internet Explorer 7's content caching and decompression improvements

Content caching eliminates a round-trip to the server (or reduces traffic with conditional GETs), and compression, of course, effectively increases throughput by compressing data. Compression (through standard algorithms such as gzip) plays a role in the dial up speedup services offered by several ISPs such as MSN, AOL, Netzero who offer a premium service that ‘speeds up’ dialup or broadband. Most of these services use dedicated servers and a combination of standard and proprietary algorithms for compression, and/or tune TCP/IP parameters on the machine for speeding up data transfer. Compression is likely to be a key part of the perceived speed up as most web content makes for good compression candidates: typically ASP for HTML compresses 2X (two-fold), JS files for JavaScript by 2-4X and CSS files for style sheets compresses by 2-5X. Proprietary algorithms are typically used for other media content, which these IE changes don’t impact.