This is an HTML 5 Canvas application. It's a pretty standard "designer" application where the user adds objects to a layout, moves them around, and edits their properties.
It works very well, but it turns out to have real performance problems in IE 9 on Windows 7. I would appreciate any thoughts!
Operations often take 10 seconds instead of the usual 2 seconds.
Also, after using the application a little while, the browser gives an error message that the host "is not responding", giving options Recover Webpage and X. Once that starts to happen, it happens for every user action including the File menu, and I can only get out of it by editing the URL location text. In particular, it generally happens on any attempt to use the browser's profiler in Developer Tools. This is obviously frustrating, but it may also be a clue. I wondered if there might be pending synchronous AJAX calls, as suggested by this error message, but capturing the network traffic using Developer Tools suggests that all calls are complete.
The problem seems specific to this combination of browser and OS. IE 9 on Windows Server 2008 behaves OK, and so do Firefox and Chrome on Windows 7. The problem is the same for 32-bit or 64-bit IE.
Most of these operations have a server-side component too. For example, adding a text object makes an AJAX call to serve an image for the object. The server API is implemented as a small TurboGears application which uses ImageMagick for the image processing. But rough profiling indicates that nothing unusual is happening on the server side. This suggests that the problem really is in the JavaScript.
The Task Manager shows the browser using CPU of 90% or more when the application is running. This is true for any browser, not just IE 9. This is likely because of the tight rendering loop in the application, so one idea we had was to redraw the canvas less often. Unfortunately this did not seem to help. requestAnimationFrame seems like a good idea, but is not supported in IE 9.
A colleague suggested that using the Google Chrome Frame plug-in might help. It might be an acceptable solution, but I haven't tried it yet.
I found some advice to turn on the Control Panel option "Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering", but that doesn't seem to help.
One thing I have noticed: It seems the canvas is much slower in IE if you start drawing on it when it's not in the document.
So I do document.body.appendChild(canvasEl) before I draw. You can even make the canvas element dislay: none; but at least it should be in the body.
Update: It seems that for Chrome and Firefox, appending the canvas to the body is slower. So if you don't need it to be added to the body, don't add it for Chrome and Firefox.
I'm posting this question here, but I'm not 100% sure where the problem lies. I have a site hosted through Media Temple that I'm developing. It's started to continually give me http 206 responses (partial content) on image and js assets. I see these through firebug. This results in missing images and js files, or in some browsers like Safari, half rendered images. When I view my work off my local server I see no issues.
I see this behavior on all browsers, firefox 3.6, safari 5.0.3, chrome 8. I work off of mac os x 10.6.6. Different images exhibit this behavior at different times, and the only thing that works temporarily is to clear the cache, but I'll typically begin to see the problem again shortly.
The other thing, as much as I can tell, I don't see this problem on other machines. My work machine (also a Mac) doesn't show this behavior at all. The clients this site is for have never complained of these issues at all.
I've also taken some of these problematic assets and moved them to other servers and pointed my browser there, no problem, so it doesn't seem to be a corrupt file.
I've run out of places to look and was hoping someone on these forums might have some suggestions. This is a real mystery and would love to get to the bottom of it.
Sounds like a problem on the server side. Have you tried restarting the web server or taking a look at the error log?
I'll try to be short and clean. I did website for friend, although she says some people complain about pink quote field to cover the text area, I've tried this on different PCs, browsers but haven't seen this kind of issue. So I was thinking maybe that old IE or something?
Here's websites link: http://www.zlobekbambino.pl
Thanks in advance
I would try using a service such as Adobe's Browser Lab or Browser Shots to test the site in various browsers to see which is causing problems. You can then try to work out how to fix it.
Assuming you have a Windows PC, you can test with all versions of IE by installing IETester. It's a very usefull program that allows you to run all versions of IE in tabs in the same window.
Obviously though, it only works on a Windows PC, so if you're on a Mac you won't be able to use it. In that case, http://www.browsershots.org allows you to download screenshots from virtually any browser ever released. The downside of that is that you only get a static screenshot, so not much use for testing dynamic content, but still a useful tool.
I'm currently finishing up testing a new Ruby on Rails app. Just recently, some of the pages do not seem to finish downloading in IE8. In FireFox, Chrome and Safari, everything works perfectly. The pages all validate successfully using the W3C validator.
When I view the page source in IE8, the page has been chopped off around 75% of the size it should be. IE8 claims the page is finished loading, and doesn't give any errors, but of course the page isn't rendering properly.
Has anyone seen this before? I'd really appreciate any help.
Have you tried to watch the http requests, using something like Http Analyzer or HttpWatch (like firebug for IE)? That might shed some light if there is a problem with a JS or CSS file not being found, or if the server is returning something other than a 200.
HttpWatch has a free version at http://www.httpwatch.com/download
IE8 Comes with a built in developer toolbar. Just press F12.
You should be able to diagnose most problems using it.
Also, open the page in Firefox with the Webdeveloper Toolbar addon and check if any javascript issues are arising. I find that sometimes you may only see the error in IE8 but you might only figure out what is wrong using Firefox. Give it a try!
There was a javascript call in the page that needed to be wrapped with:
document.observe("dom:loaded", function() { ... };
in order to work in IE. Apparently, it was disruptive enough to kill the entire page render. Thanks BenTheDesigner!
Since this is the first result on a Google search for IE8 not completing a page request, I thought I'd add on that I've seen the same symptoms caused by Sophos Anti Virus' Browser Helper Object which interferes with page requests and thus doesn't complete download requests every time.
Hitting F5 resolves the issue most of the time but a click to the next page can cause it to reappear. Other symptoms include odd page rendering of background images, incorrect repeating or no repeating being done at all despite a CSS declaration specifically telling a background to repeat. I spent a week debugging my CSS and XHTML only to eventually try disabling all the browser "Add-ons" and all of a sudden the issue went away.
I nailed it down to Sophos' BHO and now no rendering issues.
Is anyone writing applications specifically to take advantage of google chrome?
Are there any enterprise users who are considering using it as the standard browser?
Yes, I have started to pay very good attention to Google Chrome for my applications. Recent analytics show that between 6%-15% of my users are accessing my applications (varies between 6 to 15 in different applications) on Chrome. And, this number looks on an upward trend.
Thus, I can't really ignore it for testing right now.
As far as taking it as a standard goes, thats a long way off. I still have to test for IE6! :( Though, we have been planning to start using features like Gears (inbuilt in Chrome - downloadable elsewhere) once Chrome crosses the 25% mark. Thats when I believe that we will be looking at Chrome to be our preferred browser. I hope that we have Chrome 1.0+ by then! ;)
I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back except for the occasional site which doesn't work properly, forcing me to load it in Firefox. All my existing web applications work fine on it, and I'm using it for primary testing on my current development project.
I'm not actually targeting chrome, but I have added chrome to my browsers to test sites on. I've found some odd quirks in this product where some plugins cause the browser to hang, or run really slow in some environments, but they are still in beta in active development. But I definately now make sure sites I work on render well in chrome, as well as firefox, latest versions of IE, safari, Konquerer and opera. I usually check out how it looks on lynx as well, that helps me catch "un-alternated text" in images. Yeah, I know that isn't a word, but some people will understand what I'm saying.
Because chrome uses the webkit to render HTML, you can be assured if it works in safari, it'll work under chrome, however it's rendering engine isn't up to scratch quite yet. I think writing applications that take advantage of it is similar to writing iPhone applications, remember chrome is expected to be adopted by android to make it similar to iPhone. That way it pretty much takes advantage of all those iPhone apps.
Would I install it as the browser of choice? not yet - but i'll certainly work on valid web pages that will render across all browsers.
One of our major customers has outlawed Chrome because it installs on the C drive without asking. They deploy a standard image with a small C drive and large D drive so they can easily re-clone the system part of the image on C without destroying the client's personal files on D. Most software allows you to choose the install directory. Anything that violates this is disallowed, and they're a big enough company to have some weight with most vendors.
We have enough headaches trying to support
Firefox
Two versions of IE which have their own iffy bugs
Safari
I'm not sure why we continue to support Safari. Most of our users (corporate) use IE6 or IE7. We try to make sure that things work in both of those.
Maybe not for programming purposes but Chrome w/ Google Reader makes for the most powerful RSS reader. Can handle up to 1500 feeds w/ performance still ok, managing subscriptions still functioning.
I'm using it on my work machine, but that's about it. It's been stable for me, and I like the barebones UI. I'll still switch to Firefox for the web developer extensions however.
I'm liking some of GoogleChrome- the Start page with your 9 most recent is the winner for me. The interface takes a little getting used to, but the speed is impressive, especially with Gmail.
However, it glitches with Java, which rules it out for serious work at the moment. I use FireFox mostly and have Chrome for the "other" websites at work.
I'm considering using GWT on an intranet project and considering suggesting to the users that use Chrome to take advantage of the enhanced Javascript performance. Any AJAX-heavy app would be a great candidate to target Chrome.
At my company, we're not targeting it, but we're definitely paying attention to it. My boss is using it as his primary browser, and I have implemented browser detection for it in our scripts in case we ever to need to target it for some reason.
Chrome has the .png opacity bug where the transparent parts of the .png are a solid color if you try to transition the opacity from 0 to 1. In IE7 the opaque parts are black, and in Chrome, they are white. Today, I decided to go ahead and account for this bug in my JavaScript. I don't really test sites on Chrome that often, but I am actually using it for almost all of my browsing.
I will target Chrome as soon as a stable Linux and OSX client is available.
Targeting Chrome/Chromium right now, I think is like targeting Konqueror web browser. It will get popular, but you should wait to a more stable beta, and/or some Linux and OS X client.
My website statistics shows 3.xx % visitors using Chrome which arrived just few weeks back. And Opera is only 4.xx % which has been around for several years.
Easily you can see that rate at which Chrome is picking up.
You can see how easily Google takes over all areas of your computing world and personal world too.
Since Chrome uses Webkit, it has the same rendering engine and DOM support as Safari (not necessarily the same revision of Webkit though). By testing in Safari, you can generally get by without worrying about Chrome. Any differences you find are probably just bugs that you should file on instead of work around.
However, because Chrome uses a different JS engine, there may be a few incompatibilities with Safari. So, if you're doing anything with JS, you might as well fire up Chrome and see if there's anything obviously wrong.
Generally though, you don't target browsers, you target rendering engines (with their associated DOM support and JS engines).
I am using Google Chrome, so far all the web apps I have work fine in it with no modifications.
No.
Why help Google further build an evil empire? In this particular case it is so obvious that they do not care about users but only obsessed with gathering usage info.
It's not any major player yet