OT: Scripting on websites [Was: Re: QtD 0.1 is out!]

[grauzone]

Walter Bright wrote:
> grauzone wrote:
>>> But... why Javascript hurts you that much? What did it do to you?
>>
>> Yesterday, I was on digitalmars.com, browsing the archive for the D 
>> newsgroup. Actually, I just had it open in a tab, and was actively 
>> browsing another website. I wondered why the browser had such a bad 
>> response. Finally, I figured out, that the cause was some JavaScript 
>> code included from Amazon. It showed some applet on the bottom of the 
>> archive page, and it didn't even work. All it did was displaying some 
>> loading gif animation and eating CPU. When I blocked Amazon, all was 
>> fast and responsive again.
> 
> I had some email discussions with Amazon about the miserable speed of 
> the Amazon cloud widget. The idea of the cloud widget is great, it's 
> supposed to look at the contents of the page and produce links to Amazon 
> products, like books, that are related. So I really wanted this to work. 
> But Amazon tech support insisted that it was not slow, it was merely 
> pining for the fjords (ok, I added that last bit <g>). I was seeing load 
> times that averaged around 30 seconds.

Not sure what you're saying, but it was eating up my CPU even some 
minutes after the page was loaded.

> In the face of that, I removed the widget a few weeks ago, after telling 
> tech support I'd add it back in once they fixed the speed problems.
> 
> If you found a page where it is still active, can you please give me the 
> url?

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Mixin_versus_c_preprocessor_11830.html

I suspect this is the offending piece of HTML:

<SCRIPT charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript" 
src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822/US/classicempire/8006/adfa749b-6f27-4cdf-a046-716a8fab7cab"> 
</SCRIPT>