[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

I had been noticing that while it has been working just fine for every other website I visit, Internet Explorer was really bogging down on any Invision Board site -- most specifically, UMSF. It was taking a good 30 seconds to move from one page to another. I'm certain it's an issue with IE on my own machine, since I can access UMSF nice and fast on other machines.

So, when I went out to download the latest Google Earth update (complete with 3D Mars!), I found the GE update link also included an option to dl Google Chrome. So, I downloaded it.

This thing just rips through UMSF! Very fast page-turns. Looks just fine and nothing I've run across here yet has failed to load.

So, while I still use IE for most of my browsing, I'm now using Google Chrome exclusively for UMSF.

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

-the other Doug

[Fran Ontanaya]

Invision boards use a lot of styling and Javascript code. Internet Explorer hasn't got a stellar performance in that area, as it tries to be backwards compatible with its own old versions --ask a web designer about IE6 standards if you want to see hair turning white in real time. Chrome has a specially tinkered engine, since many Google apps are Javascript-heavy, and has separate processes for each tab, which should make better use of hyperthreading/multicore CPUs.

Also, the cache of a long running IE will be bigger and more fragmented than a fresh install of another browser. A slow down can be a sign of malware too.

On low spec machines, big browsers like IE and Firefox are somewhat hungry for CPU and RAM. The "H3v" browser uses fewer resources, renders CSS and runs ECMAScript, the standard version of Javascript. It still doesn't beat elinks on Linux, though (I just checked, and UMSF is quite usable on it).

[imipak]

I just checked

Good grief, so it does!

Full disclosure: I'm biased; I've been using Firefox since the early days of the naked gecko exe, and I've got my name in the (extended) credits (just for submitting bug reports, not coding, I hasten to add.)

I'm using the "minefield" nightly build (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090225 Minefield/3.2a1pre), and I've got no latency issues at all on a Lenovo R61 Thinkpad. Javascript performance has been really snappy since Tracemonkey landed in (I think) Firefox 3.1 . Usability of stuff like Gmail, Google maps and some AJAX-y apps at work is noticeably better. MSIE? I love it! It pays my salary... (my employer mostly fights spam and malware, mostly emanating from malware-riddled Windows boxes pwned through IE vulnerabilities. )