Browser problem

[milominderbinde]

The crashes have stopped.

 

[Cory Streater]

What about your reports of font issues?

 

[Cory Streater]

Is everyone having a better browsing experience with the old footer back in the forums as far as rendering issues and browser lockups? You guys have gone quiet, so I'll take your silence as a yes otherwise. Just want to make sure everyone is happy from that standpoint.

 

[Puzzlegal]

Yes, thanks.

 

[fireshot91]

Yes, now how about a more simplified header?

 

[Cory Streater]

Sweet. Thanks guys.

 

[milominderbinde]

Re: Android Central vBulletin edit fonts unreadably small

These problems with the fonts IE8 and IE 9 are forced to use are not corrected. This is a seperate issue from the crashes and slow loading pages.

Please help.

Fonts
A few weeks ago a change was made to VBulletin that has made editing almost impossible for me on two of my computers.

AC Forums is locking the font so that I cannot correct it with system fonts or IE9 font options. PreCentral is fine. For instance if you make this post with the Switch Editor Mode button OFF so you can see the code, the font is maybe Arial Narrow 8 pointsbut it is nearly impossible to read. Take a look:

Notice how it looks like the word impossile looks like it is "im poss ible". And "locking" looks like "bcking"These are kerning errors in the narrow font. Zooming in to 125% actually make the letters smash together more making it harder to read.

Here is that same screen to post on PreCentral:

When you switch to WYSIWYG, the font size increases and is more legible but still no where as good as PreCentral.

Help!

 

[Cory Streater]

Okay Milo I'll check it out. Believe it or not, I didn't change something in vB, but I might need to change something that was changed to accommodate the footer. I know a font pack was one of the things that was loaded to make things work right.

 

[Cory Streater]

This is what I see. Can you just PM or email me?

Send me your screen size, full IE version number, and what you see in Internet Options > Fonts in IE?

Thanks.

 

[milominderbinde]

On my Windows 7 machine, it is like that. On my XP machines it looks like the screenshots.

 

[Cubfan]

I'm using the latest Firefox on a quad-core desktop. Loading this site only causes my processor fan to come on and my performance to go down the tubes... homepage, I mean.

I'm guessing that there are way too many scripts, flash ads, and things running on the homepage that my Norton Internet Security is getting bogged down trying to scan it all... it's the exact same kind of performance hit I get when Norton is doing a virus scan in the background.

Don't know what it is exactly, but it's making it really a really painful experience to come to the homepage for updates. May have to rely on reading updates on Facebook, RSS, or load the mobile version in my browser.

 

[Gekko]

i keep getting -

502 Bad Gateway

nginx

all over the headers of everywhere on this site. it's become really slow, laggy, bloated, and unresponsive.

i'm using Chrome 13 on Win7.

please fix asap.

thank you.

 

[Cory Streater]

Forums should be good. I know there is a big effort underway to enhance performance on the main page as well. The owners of this site are also users of the site as well

 

[Mark_Venture]

Forums should be good. I know there is a big effort underway to enhance performance on the main page as well. The owners of this site are also users of the site as well

Forums working great for me today.

main page is still a dog. I hope whatever they did to the forum's gets done to the main home page.

 

[froggersloth]

I have a similar problem with the home page. When I go to it, my entire browser freezes for a second or so, and then "hops". It sort of jumps up a few pixels and then back down. Netflix, running in a different browser window, has frozen video, although the audio continues. This is Firefox 3.6. I'm going to start disabling elements (Javascript, Flash, etc) and see what's causing it. I guess there's always the mobile site until this gets fixed.

 

[froggersloth]

Ok, I guess I have part of my answer. A couple of points:

1) Why am I downloading a 200K .png of "Jared Dipane" that doesn't even show on the home page?

2) Why isn't that picture reduced in size, both dimensions and bytes?

3) Is there no way for the 2755 line, 10651 word, 134738 character js_a1de670e01c8b6b453184a8f1c504662.js javascript file to be reduced in size and resource demands? How about the 195K www-embed_core_module-vflXhboHY.js or the 135K www-embed-vflIi8lfi.css? Bloody hell, seriously? Just the various .js files are 625K.

4) Can't the image in the article "Sony Tablet S slated for Sept. 16 US launch, priced at $499.99" be reduced in size, both dimensions and bytes? Or at least in bytes? Just making it a jpeg reduces it to a little over half its current size. As a 70% jpeg, it's 100% readable and is 16K. This is just one example. so don't fixate on it-- most other images could very easily be optimized.

5) Just the html for the home page is almost a quarter of a megabyte.

6) There are too many calls to external sites. I've waited for loads from:
youtube.com
cdn.androidcentral.com
cdn.smartphoneexperts.com
i2.ytimg.com
i4.ytimg.com
a2.twimg.com
api.twitter.com
platform.facebook.com

7) Is it really necessary to have direct links for 20 different phones on the sidebar?

8) Must everything that's on the home page really be there? You can easily get rid of "Meet the team" (no offence, but *no one* cares), the pictures of people following AC on Facebook (the same number of people care about this as do "the team"), the "where did it all go" image, and either the "join our community" or the "the forums and you" bits. Seriously-- its Too. Much. Crap.

Even when I disable everything except images, CSS and HTML, it's still horrendous. They threw together the largest, most jam-packed page they possibly could, threw in a few images that aren't even used, said "eh, our users have broadband", placed pinkies to the corners of their mouths and cackled into the night sky. I know... for every element on that page, someone, somewhere in the AC or SPE management decided that traffic would be increased by cross-posting. For any element I mention, someone can respond, "but it drives traffic (and ad revenue) to XYZ!" I'm sure there's a great reason for every last element. It's too much.

 

[timkedojeh]

Note: I'm not a dev for SPE, but I've dealt with Drupal (the framework they use on the back-end) quite a bit.

1) Why am I downloading a 200K .png of "Jared Dipane" that doesn't even show on the home page?

2) Why isn't that picture reduced in size, both dimensions and bytes?

That image is used on Jared's "Meet the team" tab in the superfooter. As for why it's not been resized: good question. Probably an oversight.

3) Is there no way for the 2755 line, 10651 word, 134738 character js_a1de670e01c8b6b453184a8f1c504662.js javascript file to be reduced in size and resource demands? How about the 195K www-embed_core_module-vflXhboHY.js or the 135K www-embed-vflIi8lfi.css? Bloody hell, seriously? Just the various .js files are 625K.

Drupal's extendable through the use of modules, and each one has it's own Javascript and CSS. Luckily, the framework allows you to compress all their individual files into one aggregate file; this reduces the number of small GETs that need to be done, but results in one massive file to pull. The idea is, once the user's loaded the page once, this is cached and doesn't need to be pulled again.

4) Can't the image in the article "Sony Tablet S slated for Sept. 16 US launch, priced at $499.99" be reduced in size, both dimensions and bytes? Or at least in bytes? Just making it a jpeg reduces it to a little over half its current size. As a 70% jpeg, it's 100% readable and is 16K. This is just one example. so don't fixate on it-- most other images could very easily be optimized.

This goes back to points 1 and 2, which I am in agreement with. Drupal does have several modules available that allow for image compression on upload; I'm surprised SPE doesn't take advantage of these. Granted, it could be because some of them are a real pain to integrate with some WYSIWYG editors, and don't catch all image files uploaded.

5) Just the html for the home page is almost a quarter of a megabyte.

This goes back to the earlier point of Drupal being a framework. It's massive, complex, and a little on the heavy side, but it's extremely flexible and powerful. I'm not really sure if they can get rid of it without losing some functionality.

6) There are too many calls to external sites. I've waited for loads from:
youtube.com
cdn.androidcentral.com
cdn.smartphoneexperts.com
i2.ytimg.com
i4.ytimg.com
a2.twimg.com
api.twitter.com
platform.facebook.com

By removing these calls, they'd remove Facebook and Twitter buttons, images stored on CDNs (including two of their own), and Youtube videos. Not exactly something that you can just throw out; it's a reality of the modern web.

7) Is it really necessary to have direct links for 20 different phones on the sidebar?

Consequence of a fast-moving Android ecosystem. I'm sure they could cut this down, but I imagine the links help get people where they need to go.

8) Must everything that's on the home page really be there? You can easily get rid of "Meet the team" (no offence, but *no one* cares), the pictures of people following AC on Facebook (the same number of people care about this as do "the team"), the "where did it all go" image, and either the "join our community" or the "the forums and you" bits. Seriously-- its Too. Much. Crap.

I'll agree that the superfooter needs to be trimmed; you're right, a lot of it is unnecessary to be loaded on every page load. Meet the team should be reduced to a text link on the sidebar and put on another page; a tag cloud moved to the bottom of a page is pretty useless; and there are plenty of redundant links in the section that no one sees that are already available at the top of the page. The superfooter should be reduced to just a 'footer'.

Even when I disable everything except images, CSS and HTML, it's still horrendous. They threw together the largest, most jam-packed page they possibly could, threw in a few images that aren't even used, said "eh, our users have broadband", placed pinkies to the corners of their mouths and cackled into the night sky. I know... for every element on that page, someone, somewhere in the AC or SPE management decided that traffic would be increased by cross-posting. For any element I mention, someone can respond, "but it drives traffic (and ad revenue) to XYZ!" I'm sure there's a great reason for every last element. It's too much.

As far as I can tell, everything that is downloaded by the site is used; some of it's just not readily visible at first glance.

Honestly, I don't think the overall site is that bad; it almost seems like the site's static content isn't being cached, though. I refreshed the site several times while looking at Chrome's Network monitor, and hardly anything is being pulled from cache. I would expect things like the staff pictures, pictures of the phones, etc. to be static, so it's odd that the site's making the browser request for that data over and over again.

 

[Cory Streater]

Guys -- please participate in the survey Phil posted and express your satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction in there. I'm not trying to silence you here, but wanted to make sure you knew about the survey.

 

[timkedojeh]

Cory: I actually took the survey just after I posted my response above. I'd forgotten to do that earlier.

 

[Puzzlegal]

Guys -- please participate in the survey Phil posted and express your satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction in there. I'll trying to silence you here, but wanted to make sure you knew about the survey.

Can you post a link? (Is it further up in this thread?)