Will domain sharding of content become redundant?

Question

So currently IE7 can only handle 2 simultaneous images from a single domain, hence domain sharding. What does the future hold for domain sharding, will new browsers that can handle more connection render it unneccessary?

Answer 1

One other advantage of this "domain-sharding" has to do with avoiding to send cookie information for requests to static content.

Answer 2

Digging up old threads, but this question should become more and more relevant.

Using separate domains for logically separate things (for example things under different authorities) will always be useful (quite obviously). From a pure performance standpoint however, domain sharding must and will die.

This is because it always was a (suboptimal) hack around head-of-line blocking in HTTP/1.1 pipelines, which will be fixed in HTTP/2.0.

Until HTTP/2.0 is finalized and widely deployed though, sharding is the best we can do, but it's very difficult to get right (mostly because it depends so much on both the application and the clients) -- you'll always end up making artificial tradeoffs.