I find it amazing that my PC which can run games like Doom or Witcher 3 is seemingly brought to its knees by web browsing. Chrome crashes a lot, pages often take several seconds before they’ll accept input, scrolling is choppy, etc.
It’s hard to break down where the slowdowns are coming from. A fast connection doesn’t seem to solve all of them (although my home internet often varies radically in speed, which is its own pack of issues, going from the service, to the modem, to the wifi router, to the USB wifi receiver on my PC).
It seems like a browser can get really gummed up running Javascript and doing whatever magical behind-the-scenes stuff it has to do. And a lot of the loading is apparently dynamic so the page is never ‘completely’ loaded and able to be scrolled around seamlessly.
How much of these issues do adblockers clear up? I generally avoid them (I used to work at a company that lived and died by selling ad space based on uniques and pageviews, so I try to be a good sport about it). I’m not even talking about really obnoxious pop-up stuff – just standard sidebars, maybe one of those annoying Outbrain modules, etc.
Just wondering what other people’s experiences of every-day web browsing are, where the bottlenecks and irritations come from, etc. Also, is Chrome still the leanest browser around, or has that changed? And how many tabs do you typically keep open at once while maintaining good performance? I admit I often have 10-20 tabs open, but on the other hand I can get Chrome crashes and massive slowdowns with just a couple of tabs open, depending on how the stars align.
TLDR version: I miss the good old days, consarn it!
I always laugh to myself that on my gaming PC, on which i’ve left Internet Explorer as the default, because on my gaming pc i don’t care, and left MSN as the default webpage, because i don’t care, and will sometimes follow a link to an article ON MSN, the page it goes to - the supposed premiere page made by Microsoft - is so slow, crashy, unstable, glitchy and otherwise unusable, IE locks up. I mean, at least make the front-facing page of your company work with the software of said company!
Other websites load at varying speeds depending on how CPU heavy they are. For example, vbulletin forums load almost instantly. The reddit homepage (even with thumbnails loading) is quicker than the qt3 forum homepage.
Wumpus’ forum software seems to be disproportionately heavy on CPU, and my CPU is by far the weakest link in my PC.
Not the Qt3 frontpage, but I’m generally very impressed with how performant Discourse is for what it’s doing. Even on terrible, borderline-unusable devices with Qualcomm CPUs ;)
(Joshing aside, I am quite serious about the compliment part. Really a solid user experience.)
Not sure how accurate a way of measuring pageload time this is, but the top is the forumview of a large Irish forum I’m a member of, and the bottom is qt3
It isn’t a knock on Discourse in general, I just prefer quicker over fancier when it comes to a forum - and there is a noticeable delay with Discourse.
Trying to browse on my iPad is also a nightmare. And because I’m sick so much I actually browse the web much more on iPad. One of the main problems is a web page loads, resets itself halfway through loading, or just as bad when I’ve read 1/3 of the page it stops then reloads the entire thing again, and again, and again. Since so many pages are so slow to load in the first place I spend more time waiting vs. reading. Any suggestions on this would be great. I’m not very versatile when it comes to Apple ecosystem and Apple OS.
Omg, for love of a that is good in this world, run an adblocker. I can’t imagine browsing the internet quagmire without one. Find other ways to support the sites you visit regularly.
