The other thing that is irritating is websites that take so long to render they freeze up my mouse and computer, rendering interaction with their website useless for 10 seconds. It's not like I'm on an old machine either. I tend to show my appreciation by clicking the little "x" on the tab that corresponds to the webpage.
There really isn't any good excuse for this stuff: I've seen quite a few sites that clearly use heavy javascript that render almost instantly. There is no reason that a blog or simple site should take a long time to render.
There seems to be a trend of making things "awesome" with no consideration of user-experience and usability, and frankly, the designers and programmers who do this stuff make the good programmers look bad and ultimately hold back the progress of the web.
And I don't use Google Fonts either because I'd rather have my fonts installed locally.
You're a programmer, surely you must realize this is a Chrome bug? Not specific web page bug?
Personally it affects one of my PC's but not the other. I've tried to fix it a couple of times but because it's very infrequent it's hard to test a fix. Google 'Chrome Freeze' to see the frequency with which this happens.
This isn't being caused by web pages, it's a bug in Chrome that they can't seem to fix. It used to be caused by having two versions of Flash installed, but who knows what it is now. It gets worse/better over time.
You'll thank your lucky stars with the knowledge that I am not a professional programmer and I'm definitely not a front-end or much of a web programmer. Besides, there are others page down who seem to experience this problem, presumably some of them are programmers who aren't aware of this bug?
With this information, I am now more mystified at why some sites get burned by this bug while others do not, and, at least with your logic, why a programmer wouldn't be well aware of this bug; if they are, why aren't they exploring options and why aren't these programmers testing their functionality on Chrome (all browsers). Surely, these sites run slow on FF as well even if there is no freezing up like I am describing?
With Chrome I find that all the slow downs / freezes I've noticed have been while flash is running in one or more of my tabs. Flash + Chrome just doesn't seem to be a great combination.
BTW, you can disable flash in chrome by going to: chrome:plugins
No, there are plenty of JS heavy pages that can all but bring Firefox to its knees as well, and - if the machine is heavily loaded already - basically freeze the entire machine. I surf using both Chrome and Firefox at different times on different boxes, and I see this behaviour across both.
It's all about monetization. If you look at the source of a typical media website you'll see that most of what gets downloaded and most of the JavaScript executed on page load is adverts, social crap and analytics stuff.
The hitching frequently happens because adding iframes to a document is damned expensive, and requires the browser to concoct a whole new DOM per iframe. While analytics don't tend to make heavy use of iframes, advertisements absolutely do.
I was working on a page the other day for optimisation - 97/100 score now.
The main issues that remain are to do with FB, Google
- serve images from a consistent domain,
- leverage browser caching,
- minify javascript (that's a Google problem, I mean, really?!),
- ga.js and plusone causing reflows
- script serialisation
Doesn't appear there's much to be done about these from an end user perspective but they're not major slow downs as the page is well above the median load speed for similar pages.
Yes, but that doesn't help much against the JavaScriptional (and rendering) bout of hyperactivity that that ensues shortly after the first HTTP response and later on while using the site.
The complexity of embedding all that stuff is enormous. Just block it all for a day and see what that does to the perceived speed of the site.
I have found the biggest culprits are the social widgets and fancy js library. Ads and analytics rarely slows down a site (for me). There are exception though like few days ago I bumper in to a site that had 6 different analytics. That's just crazy, also outside widgets can load their own analytics (I think disqus does that). Things can quickly turn dirty.
The main reason I ever see this sort of thing is because my (modest, but not crazily slow) machine doesn't have enough memory—it only has 1GB, which definitely isn't enough for multiple tabs with typical bloated websites these days. If I've got gmail, youtube, and a few other tabs open, my machine will happily thrash it's little disk-drive out to accomodate them.... ><
[This is especially true if you're using chrome, which tends to use more memory per tab than other browsers because of its process-per-tab architecture (which is nice because of the isolation and controllability it gives, but it does make it more difficult to share memory between tabs).]
If I were in charge (I'm not because it's a work machine), the first thing I'd do is buy more memory.
I'm running an i5 w/ 6 Gig of RAM. I'm pretty obsessed with keeping my machine clean as well, so I'm not entirely sure if it is the slow machine, but idk really.
This happens to me sometimes in Opera, Chrome and Firefox, and it's extremely irritating.
I remember the good old days when dual-core processors were just starting to become mainstream, and browsers would just use one core. The browser could crash all it liked, but the system would always be responsive. But now browsers take advantage of all cores, meaning that if they crash, they can block your entire system.
I wish there was a way of telling the browser to strictly use only K cores on Windows. I'd instantly switch to a browser offering that feature.
Not a windows user here but I remember that you can do something like this using Task Manager. Just right click on the process and see if you can set the CPU affinity or something similar for your browser.
What OS/browser are you using? I have no idea what you are talking about. The only time I have ever seen anything like what you are describing is when maybe something is messed up with flash or an external pdf viewer. But even that doesn't freeze up the mouse.
Also I am a pretty heavy browser user, I have 20+ tabs open on average and a bunch of plugins.
Usually use Chrome on a Win7. I've seen this happen about once a day or every other day. Comment got upvotes so I guess I'm not alone in this experience?
Are you sure it's not just flash (from e.g. ads) acting up? On my win7 laptop the only time I saw pages freeze was due to a plugin conflict where somehow flash managed to install itself twice as a plugin; disabling one of these would usually fix it. Or, you know, just try disabling flash altogether and see if there's a difference.
The other thing that is irritating is websites that take so long to render they freeze up my mouse and computer, rendering interaction with their website useless for 10 seconds. It's not like I'm on an old machine either. I tend to show my appreciation by clicking the little "x" on the tab that corresponds to the webpage.
There really isn't any good excuse for this stuff: I've seen quite a few sites that clearly use heavy javascript that render almost instantly. There is no reason that a blog or simple site should take a long time to render.
There seems to be a trend of making things "awesome" with no consideration of user-experience and usability, and frankly, the designers and programmers who do this stuff make the good programmers look bad and ultimately hold back the progress of the web.
And I don't use Google Fonts either because I'd rather have my fonts installed locally.