When you say "lagfest" what do you mean? I can swipe both ways, forward and back, in IE Metro and the pages load within 1 second or less! So MS did get it right. Seems to be an issue with your machine maybe? I'm sitting here right now on a Surface Pro 128 swiping away and page loads 5 or more swipes either way load almost instantly!
Or are you talking about RT version?
Hmm, well there is always the possibility of specific hardware error but this has been an ongoing problem with my Surface Pro. I swipe back to a prior page and the little dots get going and it just sits there sort of grayed out for 10 seconds or more. Also, I'm not experiencing lag anywhere else, just in Metro IE.
Hmmm, just tested a relatively graphics-heavy website
Product reviews and prices, software downloads, and tech news - CNET and yeah, when I swipe back each page takes 2 to 3 (or more) seconds to refresh with the little dots running across the bottom. I am guessing they are having the server reload the page which really is unnecessary; it should just be cached and load instantly. They should at least give us an option of how we want that to behave - reload or just go to cache.
Also sometimes I swipe back and the prior page momentarily appears grayed out then the page I swiped from reappears and I don't go back to the prior page at all.
** Ok, I turned off all the privacy settings that might have been slowing things down some and it does seem a bit faster. I notice a website like MSN that is optimized for Windows works very quickly, but others do not.