New User Experience

[Robert Clipsham]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jarrett Billingsley" <jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:mailman.325.1246318374.13405.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky<a at a.a> wrote:
>>> "BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message
>>> news:a6268ff76dc8cbc6e39c453506 at news.digitalmars.com...
>>>> Hello Nick,
>>>>
>>>>> - Not everyone uses one of the "#1 fastest" browsers (heh, see what I
>>>>> did there?). For those people, like me, when they go to the "Projects"
>>>>> link, the page really comes across like it's hung or broken even
>>>>> though it says "Loading...". And it really takes awhile. That needs to
>>>>> be improved. Maybe shifting some of whatever processing is going on to
>>>>> the server side
>>>> IIRC the slow load is because it is on the server side. Some scipt is
>>>> loading the full set of projects every time the page loads.
>>> There's definitely at least something going on client side. Otherwise 
>>> there
>>> wouldn't be that "Loading..." message that shows up at first and 
>>> dissapears
>>> when it's loaded. Maybe it's just something trivial. But while it's 
>>> loading
>>> my browser doesn't *seem* to behave as if it's waiting for content from 
>>> the
>>> server...I really should take a look at that page source...
>> It basically consists of a div that says "Loading..." which is
>> replaced by the content loaded asynchronously.
>>
>> Would it help if it had one of those spinny-wheel images?  ;)
> 
> I've been browsing through the html/js code for that page. Looks it what it 
> does is asynchronously load an XML representation (generated by the server) 
> of all the project information and then, on the client-side, that XML is 
> parsed and used to generate the project list/links. Of course, I can't be 
> certain just from looking at that where most of the time is being spent, 
> client or server, but judging by the fact that I'm stubbornly holding on to 
> FF2 (yea, I really, really hate FF3, and I am really, really picky) and 
> nobody else seems to be complaining about the loading, I'd guess it's 
> probably mostly the client code that's taking all the time.
> 
> Also, a couple of the js files seem to have their entire content repeated. 
> Weird.
> 
> But I'm probably getting way offtopic now...
> 
> 

While we're off topic... Firefox 3.5 is released later today, you might 
wanna give that a shot. That or switch to any other modern browser that 
doesn't have known unpatched security vulnerabilities in ;)