Friday 29 April 2016

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

By Strictly-Software.com

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

Chrome was by browser of choice, due to being light weight and fast.

FireFox was in 2nd place due to the range of plugins available.

I had relegated IE into usage only to test code for cross browser compatibility issues.

However I am finding that I am actually using Internet Explorer more and more due to constant issues with both of the latest versions of these browsers.

I am running Chrome: 50.0.2661.75 (64-bit) And FireFox 46.0 buld no: 20160421124000 (64 bit) on all 3 of my machines (Win7 & Win 8.1)

There was a stage when both these honey's were humming like a bees. I even put up some articles on how to improve the speed on both browsers:

Speeding Up Chrome Can Kill It
Speeding up Google Chrome with DNS Pre-Fetching
Performance Tuning FireFox

I also put up a general PC and Browser tune up article with free tools, command line prompts and some basic things to try if you had a slow computer: Speeding up your PC and Internet connection.

However I have even found myself using IE 11 more and more due to constant hanging, pages not loading at all with the "processing request" message in the footer, or waiting for some 3rd party non asynchronous loaded in script, to download and run that blocks the site or page from running.

I think there is a far too much "API JIZZ" in the community at the moment.

What this means is that developers, due to their nature to impress and gold plate code, even when the spec doesn't call for it, are now using so many 3rd party and remotely hosted plugins like jQuery, Google Graphs, tracker code, plus loads of funky looking CPU consuming widgets to make their pages look good.

You only have go into Facebook or G+ and try and write a message. Not only will Google Plus's new post box move around the page before you can start writing, but both websites are constantly analysing your keystrokes to find out if the previous string matches a contact, community or page, in your contact book for them to link to.

The more people and pages you have stored the slower this process becomes. Yes is might be handy but why not just require a symbol like + in Google+ to be put before the person name so that the code only checks that word for a relation.

Imagine having a list of thousands of pages, liked communities/pages and contacts to be constantly checked on every keydown press with AJAX requests. That is overkill. It slows down systems .

I still have two windows from Chrome spinning away for (Google Blogger blogs) at the moment. There is not much 3rd party code on these pages but they are having trouble and showing common "Waiting for Cache" and "Processing Request" messages in the status bar.

This is the same sort of thing I get in FireFox. Although in this browser, what kills me is just the slowness of getting from page to page. On many sites I have to refresh it multiple times before the code all loads and this goes for online banking to online betting sites. Just trying to watch a race on their Flash screens is a nightmare.

I had a bet on a horse the other day on Bet365.com just so I could watch the big race with an unbeaten in 11 straight wins, Douvan, running. However Bet365.com video didn't start and in SkyBet it was stuttery and kept losing picture and sound. I missed the end of one race where a horse I had backed jumped the last fence into the lead but when the picture came back it had finished 3rd!

They keep telling me to clear the cache, reboot the router and do speed tests. Things I have done many times. I have 54Mbps download speed at work and 28Mbps at home. I can stream 4k UHD TV to multiple screens so download speed is not the issue something else is.

Speedof.me is the best online speed testing site I have found as it as it uses no extra files and is ran in pure HTML5 with no Flash, Java or ActiveX type objects requiring to be loaded for it to run.

What is causing the problem I have no idea as my broadband speed seems okay. I suspect it's the large number of reverse proxies being used and the download of shared 3rd party scripts and widgets that can hang due to a large number of HTTP requests.

I tried deleting my userdata file for Google by searching for it in the address bar of Windows Explore with this line: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data 

I have also tried disabling Flash as so many times I see the "An object has crashed" bar in the header that is related to the Flash Container object failing. Sometimes a reload works other times it doesn't.

However so many sites STILL use Flash it is hard to live without it really. For example the WHOLE of Bet365.com is made in Flash which makes it very user unfriendly and hard to use with sticky scrollbars and issues with selection of items.

If anyone has similar issues or ideas on resolving them let me know, as I never thought I would be going back to IE to use as my main browser!

By Strictly-Software.com

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