I faced situation of global site redesign (not appearance, but code architecture and underlying technologies). Website has about 135 000 visitors everyday. And it's crucial to make right decision now.
I had no experience of using LESS and CSS3PIE on such big projects before. Maybe some of you can predict some trouble which I can run into using technologies mentioned above. I would like to know advantages and drawbacks.
Isn't it better to use old tested and reliable methods like sprites for round corner buttons with shadows and gradients? I look at http://zappos.com. They just degrade gracefully in IE and don't use CSS3PIE.
Nobody answered me, so I try to answer myself. Since there are server-side LESS-compilers for all major platforms (Ruby, .NET, PHP) I decided to use LESS but compile server-side instead of using LESS.js which is not good because it prevents client's browser from caching CSS.
As concerning CSS3PIE I don't see any significant drawbacks of using it, a little more load lies on client using IE but it's not so bad.
The only issue I can foresee now is background and decoration disappearing on popups. I have already encountered this problem and posted a question here but no one ever answered.
I would avoid using CSS3Pie for production sites. In my experience, the higher the number of CSS3Pie-rendered elements on the page, the worse IE8/9 will perform.
Specifically, when I was using IE9 with an IE8 document mode, and with at least 2 elements rendered using CSS3Pie (using border-radius and linear-gradient), I observed a noticeable lag when scrolling the browser window. That is, I would try and scroll down the page, and the scroll bar would take a couple of seconds to "catch up" with the mouse pointer.
As soon as I switched CSS3Pie off, no lag when scrolling was observed. The same applies for IE8 in my experience.
Related
This is a duplication of this question, which was asked 10 years ago. Seeing no solution has been mentioned there, and no solution can be found on the internet in general, I decided to post this question again.
As described in that old question, the equations rendered by MathJax on Windows always look not so good - a little bit too thin, unclear and blurry. I am getting the same result when I use Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome / Cent Browser and Firefox. So, as explained there, the rendering problem must be due to the OS I use, namely Windows.
I have also tried applying MacType to Cent Browser, which makes the fonts on Windows rendered in different ways and look better. (Here I must use Cent Browser instead of Google Chrome, because Chrome uses DirectWrite, with which MacType doesn't work and which can not be disabled, while Cent Browser allows us to do that. See this issue. I encountered another problem after disabling DirectWrite though - The equations rendered by MathJax look obviously bigger than normal size without DirectWrite on. But it's not the topic here.) However, MacType doesn't seem to have any influence on the rendering.
So is there any solution to this problem, as in 2022? Personally I think it's important since the poor quality of rendered equations has affected my browsing experience a lot.
Thanks!
I am looking for some advice on how to track application performance; the application is developed using ReactJS, and I am building it with webpack.
First of all I will just present what I have done and what the application is expected to do:
I need to render a lot of, let's just call them widgets, that update real time presenting a lot of data. So, on a scale, I would say each widget renders about 50 to 80 values, these updates might be received from the server side all at once, so they should happen instantly when data is received. Consider I might have around 25 to 30 widgets that need to update real time.
Let me tell you a little bit about the implementation:
I have used the smart/dumb pattern for ReactJS components
The actual data is stored in application state and is distributed by the smart components to dumb components through props
I am using Pure Render Mixin to avoid unnecessary rendering
Also using Immutable data so that I will ensure Pure Render Mixin is working accordingly, that is, being accurate in determining if a render is necessary and at the same time be fast, really fast.
There are no weird bindings of callbacks, that might determine re-rendering of components, this is double checked already.
Now the issues I am having:
with about 5-6 widgets, meaning around 400-500 values that need to render each second, it works very well in Chrome and decent in Firefox.
adding about 25-30 widgets gets the application to still work decent in Chrome, but it starts to act slow in Firefox, by slow I mean user interaction that might even get a delay of around 1 second. That is really unacceptable.
What I have tried:
use Chrome dev tools to measure the performance; that didn't help too much, what I could see though, is that everything is alright. And there is no way I could read all the graphics this tool provides. (And I've read a lot of articles about it)
tried to use Firebug in Firefox. That's an amazing tool, but not in this case; just by opening it with the above mentioned load (30 widgets) gets Firefox to freeze... and the profiler gave me nothing)
on a last resort, I have used the default dev tools from Firefox, it has a performance tab. That got me some information of what parts of the application has the most load on the browser. It seemed it was some heavy computing determining min/max of an Immutable.List.
Unfortunately the application still has performance issues, and it is of high importance to get it working perfect, and Firefox profiler doesn't give me any other leads.
So my questions would be:
what would be the next action to take in order to determine performance issues? (as much as possible where they are: class/method/at least file)
did you guys use any performance testing tool that gives you an insight of what the hell is happening?
is there something else to consider to improve the overall functionality, especially targeting multiple browsers? (Firefox, Chrome, IE11)
Internet Explorer 10 has so-called compatibility mode, which can be activated to make older sites display properly.
If the compatibility mode is enabled, does it slow the overall pages performance and/or JavaScript? And is there any other impact apart from performance eg. overall stability, memory usage etc?
After a bit of thought, I think the answer to your questions is:
It depends.
It depends on what your site does with css. It depends what your site does with markup. It's entirely possible that some new CSS thing has come out in the last few years that IE 11 added very good support for, and the team of engineers spend lots of time optimizing. The old legacy way to do it might work, but be slower because it's old code that never got refactored and optimized. Imagine that repeated over and over... an old IE8 feature that now has a much faster IE11 css or markup equivalent... and you're not getting to leverage any of it.
Or, maybe your site uses none of that functionality, and it's (about) the same no matter which mode you're in. While the likely scenario is that you will probably see some sort of performance hit by running in compatibility mode, it certainly isn't guaranteed.
So I am backend developer who is dipping my toes into developing a responsive site that, for SEO reasons, needs to be able to show up to a 1000 responsive "containers" for search results, ie...
[1]: http://107.6.139.93/Melbourne.homes
So what seems to be happening is that the browser is locking up trying to render all these containers or something? For searches with less then 300 results, the delay is tolerable ie...
[2]: http://107.6.139.93/Viera.homes
To be honest, i'm in somewhat over my head here (im a database guy) and i'm trying to learn, but have no idea if its going to even be possible to improve performance without using pagination (something my clients is very much against)
I'm wondering if anyone here has any insights into my issues.
EDIT - the same "lock-up" delay occurs when you resize the browser and wait for the responsive-ness to kick in
I think your overloading the browsers memory, this you can't solve with css. it's the whole package (images and content).
You could solve this by using infinite scroll and thus only load content when the user scrolls. There are some things you have to look in to before throwing yourself into infinite srcolling especially on SEO level.
You might want to read this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html
I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website.
The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily).
Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective.
So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).
I recommend a plug-in platform (Flash, Silverlight, or Java) over AJAX. Having a clean layer of abstraction between your game and the client's browser is a big advantage. In any non-trivial AJAX game look forward to endless corner-cases where browsers differ in performance or implementation.
Personally, I think Flash is easy to learn if you are coming from AJAX experience. Flash is currently the most widely installed and proven plug-in for browser games. However, Silverlight and Java are both building momentum. Also, the Unity engine has become a popular choice for commercial browser games.
I think you shouldn't leave Java out of the equation. It's a powerful, fast language, and with Java applets, you can do almost anything. If you want hardware-accelerated graphics via OpenGL, JOGL can do it, even in an applet.
On the other hand, it might not be right for you. But at this early stage, I think you should evaluate all of your options, and since you have no experience with Flash but sound like you've got a bit of programming experience, you might feel more at-home with Java.
I believe the current answer is Flash game.
Alternatives:
Java Applet: getting less and less common those days and it is not commonly installed as a plugin on many computers.
SilverLight: too new and might vary and change in time. not commonly installed on many computers and it's Microsoft (whom tends to change technology every 2 years ...)
JavaScript / AJAX: Still a new kid on the block, it's on the rise it is true with many nice features, but still lack of good cross browser for IE even IE8, can not play sounds internally, still slower than the others, and you don't know where will it evolves.
Eventually probably the best solution for now is Flash development:
Cross platform. Works fast. Long time already alive and have a lot of support.
I hope this answer will change in the next year. Happy Peasach.
Check out Jmonkey. The "plugin" loads if you have Java on your machine. Once it's cached, the next time the visitor goes to the page, it your game loads very quick. Check out their website for demos and see what I mean: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Oh, I forgot to say, it's a 3D scenegraph Java engine. I just tried it again, and it loaded in linux. Looks they've put in some good work.
Don't do it with javascript in the browser. And Flash really can be a pain just because it's closed source and you don't know if you've made a mistake or found a bug - speaking from experience. I'd never want to make another Flash game again.
How about using RaphaelJs , it is a Javascript library that make dinamyc images using SVG, and for IE, it try to make those images using the IE alternative: VML. Im using it on my own WebGame, but i dont really make complex graphics in it. The most complex thing done on RapahelJs was a heath map (20 * 20 tiles ) with a dinamyc opacity slider. An it work with jquery without any problem or configuration!