I don’t use FlickR because it’s so slow.
A quick test, the “some pictures from the last 7 days” page took 17 seconds to load.
Clicking on an image took 11 seconds before the image was visible, and about 20 before the page finished loading.
I want to flick through online pictures quickly…
Umm, do some of you even know anything about Ajax? Blaming the Ajax “loading…” graphic for slow web sites is like like blaming progress bars for slow computer operations. “I wish they would take out that progress bar which takes so long to complete, it’s just so slow.”
Ajax will make the web smoother to use and faster, as long as it’s used properly. It reduces traffic between the browser and server, processing load on the server, and the amount of refreshing on the browser. It’s operations can be asynchronous (in fact they should), meaning that if an element on a web page issues a request to the server, the user can continue using the web page while the page waits for the response from the server.
If a lazy/ignorant programmer writes a system so that it performs a synchronous postback after each field change (usually just for validation purposes, but it can be a very useful technique when used properly) as hinted at by Mike Hofer above, that’s hardly the fault of the Ajax protocol.
Adverts - are a major killer.
A simple non-ajax page with google-ads, and a couple of banners of ads will slow down immensely as it links off to other servers etc to generate the info.
Ajax is a slow method bud is versatile for some, but then add cross server advert linking and a couple of flash or macromedia space wasters and load time goes through the roof.
Even gmail is pretty slow to load for me, although a bit faster than the new Yahoo and Hotmail clients. I often get stuck on the “loading…” page for gmail.
Even gmail is pretty slow to load for me, although a bit faster than the new Yahoo and Hotmail clients. I often get stuck on the “loading…” page for gmail.
That’s because of one thing…a standard markup language will allows be a bit bloated and not be the best solution for large amounts of data. The software vendor we use for CRM has been pushing a browser based application for years now as the next best thing since sliced bread. But they basically hit a wall were the technology simply cannot support with reasonable speed and efficiency what they need it to. And for their next big release they are moving back to a windows client (.NET Smart Forms).
This really interesting from a South African perspective where 10-12 loading times on Google searchs is the norm because of our poor communications in this country.
Developing for the web in South Africa, I think, really pushes the understanding of response time to users.
Just as another example of preferring information when I want it. I recently got a dead tree subscription to my local newspaper because I was tired of having to deal with load times and annoying ads just to read the news. Yes there are multiple papers in this area but all their websites have the same problem.
FIrefox isn’t a panecea. It has some issues, like refusing to display a page (that’s already fully loaded) if links to a connected server have died - I see this happening a lot when it tries to load javascript and css from dead pages retrieved from google cache. You have to wait a minute for the connections to time out before it’ll even show the page.
(I remember fondly when it would reflow the page as it loaded the css - I guess that behavior was deemed unacceptably distracting and removed.)
My browser home page is set to about:blank, cause even Google is too slow…
Am I the only one who just makes his own homepage and sets the browser to the local file? Sure its not dynamic, but if I want news I’ll just add a link to the source I might want to read, (or just use my FF RSS).
lol @ dial-up rising from the dead. #1-it’s not dead. as i’m sure you know, lots of people still use dialup. and #2 high speed internet is supposedly cheaper in other parts of the world. telecom/cable companies will keep broadband prices at a rate where they can keep/increase customers. broadband is really not that expensive for them to provide so they can bring prices down as demand/supply vary. you can get broadband (slow dsl, at least) for about what you pay for dialup ($20-30 depending).
as for page speed, page loading times have been an issue since the internet became open to the average person. it’s nothing new, and i don’t think it’s ever really improved to the point where it would have opportunity to regress again. heh.
page load timing is one reason i almost always have multiple browser tabs open so i can do other things while i wait for content to load.
The beta Yahoo news and the Windows Live services take an absurd amount of time to load, especially when compared to a full featured web-mail app like Gmail. Thankfully, I could still revert my Yahoo mail account back to the old interface.
Neither of these services seem ready for prime time.
AJAX used right will speed up websites. The core functionality needed to do Ajax stuff really doesn’t take long to load upfront. It’s footprint should easily compare to other standard web-page stuff, like CSS and graphics. You actually don’t need to load anything extra, really.
But, if you are using the web to deliver full-fledged apps, then you will end up loading q lot more. Why? Well - the full GUI is basically running in the browser. It is using low-cost Ajax to communicate with the server - which is fine, but managing the user interface itself is another story. Manipulating the DOM model can be a bit cumbersome, and most developers resolve to a third-party library for this (or make one themselves - to “ease the pain”). Which is very understandable. Also, some apps abstract the DOM model into GUI widgets, which involves quite a bit of DOM, CSS and JS-event handling. This is cool (I think - from a geeky perspective), but the downside is that this means another library.
I wish that XUL (http://www.xulplanet.com/) became a W3C standards recommendation for browsers, which would make it uneccesary to add these libraries and present rich web-apps to users, without the current delay… XUL is already in Mozilla, it is actually the way itself is built. I realize that this is a pipe dream though. It would take a lot of Redmond ass-kicking to get the same technology into MSIE…
Seems like the 20% drop in revenue could be due to the fact that people aren’t paging through the results as much. Less impressions = less revenue.
I don’t buy into the fact that AJAX makes the web slow. In fact, properly used AJAX is designed to make the web a more responsive place. Just because some people are using it improperly doesn’t mean that you can dismiss the whole technology as slow.
“AJAX used right will speed up websites”
“In fact, properly used AJAX is designed to make the web a more responsive place”
Sure, and you can see that multi-billion Yahoo and MS are developing real fast AJAX applications instead of bloating poor end-users with fancy graphics
Second vote for about:blank
Ajax is always a good choice for “web apps” tho, imo. The app loads and then no more need to reload a page after initial start up. ajax also lets a user perform complex multi-step tasks w/o leaving the page. i guess it all depends on your user base. personalized pages are mostly going to be slow loading. i have been working on a personalized home page for some time now that hopefully loads like lightning when i finish it. the most important thing is that the most important part of the page loads first, i.e. the search section then feeds, imo.
I simply saved the HTML and images from Google’s homepage to my local disk and set my homepage to file://c:\google\index.html.
It doesn’t get much faster than that!
@jamie - chrome makes the address bar a search bar, I bet I can Ctrl-L faster than you can mouse to the home button 