I have a plugin/activex built with Firebreath (don't know which version, I think at least 1.6 - if somebody tells me where to look I'll update here).
In IE8, but not in IE9 or Chrome, memory usage grows by several MB on each page refresh.
My suspicion is that this means I have a circular structure in javascript, which is also holding a reference to the plugin. Or to the DOM element that contains the plugin? We don't build anything 'big' in javascript, so my focus falls on the (several MBs of) DLLs that comprise the plugin. Is that a reasonable idea? What else might cause this and/or how do I debug it?
Usually this is a circular reference inside your plugin; not in the javascript, but in your c++ code. There may be a bug that has crept up, though, that is causing this issue. Try the latest from github (master branch) and see if there is a change.
Related
I have developed working D3 driven charts and as far as all the other browsers go, there are no problems.
but recently the need to support them also in Internet Explorer 8 cropped up.
But so far i can't make this html display in IE8.
these are the tags used in D3:
<svg> <path> <g> <line> <circle> <rect>
for the last 6 hours i have skimmed through a lot of materials and questions including:
"Display inline SVG in IE8" which has this answer from October 2012:
I have been looking into this too and a number of options came up.
Chrome Frame - A browser plug-in that actually uses chrome underneath, meaning SVG just works. This is great if you're able to deploy plugins to the browser, for a real commercial environment however this may not be possible.
SVG Web - The aim is it bring SVG to all browsers. It looks like a fairly large project, one that's had Google's input. This doesn't however work out of the box with D3 though I don't know much about the issues.
D34Raphael - You've mentioned this one, I found again it doesn't work out of the box. Check the project out on GitHub, there hasn't been any commit activity in months and there's some pull requests "first pass on trying to get support for .on() required for event binding". If it doesn't support events, is that an issue to you? I'd generally keep away from this one.
R2D3 - Again another one you mentioned. I took the Sankey example from the D3 website and had to make a few changes to get it working. The main things I couldn't get working (Drag Events, Groups - though can use an alternative). It took about a day of effort to get the example working in IE8 and I believe is in a useable state. The project on GitHub is also much more active, the developer is committing, pulling work in and is very active on discussions etc. This gets my vote.
Also:
D3 IE8 Compatibility?
wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics
SVG Web Compatibility
But the solutions using client-side plugins are not acceptable and so far it looks that i can't display svg in IE8.
So the solution is to find some other ways to render vector graphs.
I presume that others have had the same problems
Edit:
either way, people that will encounter this same problem after me will at least have somewhat concentrated materials and will realize that there is no easy/real solution to display svg on IE8 and better to spend time starting on the existing code rewriting/adjusting for non-svg version
Edit:
after some testing i would say that its worth trying to go through R2D3 examples and see if its possible to simplify/execute the code in IE8
Samples
Edit:
During the process of testing different elements separately some r2d3 problems seem to arise
most common would be Invalid argument and Object doesn't support this property or method
as i am not used to develop for IE8 there were some useful tips that i found:
dump javascript vars
and
display objects
Not sure if you are still looking for an answer, but I ran into this issue on a project a few years back. We ended up switching over to HighCharts for the browser compatibility. At the time it was still in its infancy as a charting library, since then it's become much more powerful and still maintains browser support back to IE6.
Unfortunately for most people now supporting IE8 its down to client restrictions rather than consumers.
Without informing those that have requested it of the restraints, backwards compatibility and cost implications along with valued links from this post, the solutions for making canvas work in IE7/8 and using the JScharts variants is your best option.
Of course, it means not using D3 unless you want to double your work load = cost. Just remember to mention that every time.
Good luck
IE8 (as far as I can see) simply doesn't support SVG. The only solution I can see working is using a different graph library which uses a canvas to draw it's components. Think of libraries like CanvasJS, ChartsJS, GoJS or VisJS Network Graphs and then using excanvas to make them work for IE8.
Another solution I found when researching this topic is using Chrome Frame. It makes IE8 support SVG. Though, sadly, Chrome Frame is retired and no longer supported anymore.
Knowing all this you have to ask yourself: "Is it worth going through all of this for the less than 0,1% of people who still use IE8 and below?".
Because, if you want complete d3 compatibility you probably would have to write your own converter from svg to canvas and even then, you still have to hope that excanvas supports all the canvas functions you write.
Edit: Changed browser percentage to current IE8 usage
I want to know if a html video is being displayed on a browser, from outside said browser, ideally without any plugins or such.
Motivation - I am trying to add this feature to Caffeine which is a Linux utility which disables the OS screensaver if, say, you are watching a movie.
The flash support was done I believe by detecting the presence of particular files or folders created by the plugin.
Ideally I would like 1 solution, but if I get 2 solutions for Firefox and Chrome, that's good enough.
p.s. Ultimately this would involve python code, but I am not sure if that is sufficient to make this question on-topic, or if this belongs on Superuser or Unix&Linux
This reminds me of something a web browser I was building in VB .Net which needed to detect if there where web pages that had tags like <a href="tel: or <a href="smsI know you said you didn't want a plugin but I would think you could easily right a browser plugin for for just this. In fact not exactly what your looking for but theirs a script monkey script called Hangouts Unlimited which prevents you from getting annoying messages asking if your still awake while in a G+ hangout. I don't know much about python but I would recomennd trying to identify the elements of the tags and when ever it finds such tags to disable the screen saver. Obviously the hangouts unlimited doesn't affect the web browser and that is most likely why you prefer not to have a browser plugin because you need to access system files outside of the browser. But I hope this helps a bit.
I realize this is a very general question but we are wondering if anyone has any suggestions in trying to troubleshoot why Chrome hangs sometimes when rendering certain pages on our site. It's intermittent. We've tried checking out all the plug-ins, disabling, etc. Just can't come to any rhyme or reason why it's happening. Any pointers on how to troubleshoot and resolve would be appreciated. It's an ASP.NET MVC site. Internet Explorer has no issue. Thanks.
Without more details it isn't going to be possible for someone to answer your problem for you, but if you can invest a two or three hours in the problem then you may well be able to solve it yourself.
As the issue appears in Chrome then you may be interested in the free "Discover DevTools" course run by Codeschool and sponsored by Google (you have to register in order to follow the course, but it is free).
I suspect that the issue will turn out to be related to a memory leak where large numbers of elements are being added to and removed from the DOM using JavaScript, or the same element(s) are being added and removed multiple times. The course specifically covers "Memory Profiling" using Chrome Dev Tools, as well as the specific problem of memory leaks - the cause of them and how to resolve them.
If it is a memory leak, then the issue will closely correlate with the amount of time the page is open within the browser, especially if it is a result of one or more elements being frequently added and removed as a result of user interaction.
I'm developer of Construct 2, a HTML5 game editor for Windows. It's at http://www.scirra.com.
Recently I've been trying to add a feature that will modify an image by transforming it on a canvas. It's pretty straightforward - draw an Image to the canvas and call getImageData() to get the pixels.
When the user clicks 'preview' in our application, all the files are dumped to a temp file on disk and a browser launched to show it. Uploading to a server is not an option for previewing - some games are megabytes big.
However most browsers block you using getImageData() to get the pixels of any image loaded from disk at all. I've tried putting all the necessary image files in subdirectories as MDN suggests in its description of file:// access policies. That doesn't work either!
Chrome's --allow-file-access-from-files flag fixes it. However, I need to support all major browsers. Is there a similar workaround for at least Internet Explorer and Firefox? I have no idea about Internet Explorer, and I really wish there's something which doesn't involve manually going to about:config in Firefox, otherwise we will be deluged in support requests asking "why doesn't it work in Firefox?!".
Also, why on earth is this security policy necessary?!? It seems way over the top and makes applications like ours really difficult to write.
Any help appreciated.
Your name sounds familiar from HN.
This is pretty laid out in stone in the spec by now, though this upsets an awful lot of people. http:// and file:// are different origins, and anything that tries to put one on the other will dirty the origin. As you noted file uri's themselves have their own set of rules that make things even trickier.
Drawing something to a canvas whose origin is not the same? Too bad, the origin-clean flag henceforth is false, which then disallows you from doing various things.
A complete list of those things is located in the spec here.
But I'm sure you know all this by now. You want to get around it.
I'd suggest ins instead of trying to strong-arm the browsers around it, you bundle in some kind of lightweight web service so that things are all appearing from the same origin. It will cause a lot fewer headaches in the future.
You'll probably want something like the Python SimpleHTTPServer. But that decision really depends on what you've already got included in your product already at this point.
Our web application renders fast in some IE browsers, slow in others... It seems to be an HTML rendering problem... The first 10% of the page displays immediately, the last 90% takes up to 10 seconds, and this is static content. I've run with firefox/yslow, renders very quickly. Seems to be isolated to some users/configurations of ie. Quirks mode does not seem to make a difference.
Is there a tool or application that I can use to help me discover a rendering bottleneck? Am I doing something egregious in my code? Could it be a javascript issue? Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. thanks.
Use Fiddler to look at the times to load images, css, js files, etc. In other words, is caching a problem? Javascript can definitely cause issues in different browser versions. There's lots of optimizations you find in some versions that aren't in others. Also, make sure your html is well-formed xhtml if possible. How the page is arranged can also affect life. If your document tree is deep, it may need to wait to render large sections until it reads all the child nodes. Another thing to note, certain toolbars and plugins do look ahead loading and can slow down life. An HTTP Proxy can help you watch what's going on network-wise at least.
Not sure if anything of those ideas might help your exact problem, but they can help life overall.
If it runs fast in FF or Chrome then it's a javascript issue for sure. IE7 is VERY slow in processing large amounts of script and complicated HTML. We had a sharepoint page that took 10 seconds to render in IE and sub 1 second in FF and Chrome. We benchmarked the page by adding a timer to the server-side processing and sending the output to the client via a Response.Write(). By doing this we could determine the server time to process the page and the client time to render the page (since you would see the timer results on the screen and then wait 10 seconds for the rest to render). The bottleneck was 100% IE on the client. This also explained why the speed was variable on different peoples machines, because depending on how fast the client machine was the page would render at some speed between 8-15 seconds.
We even had MS look at the issue and they confirmed that IE has a "rich rendering" engine which is slower.... IE8 runs much faster but that is no help to anyone today.
Are you using any behaviors in your CSS? I've seen behaviors bring an app to its knees if too many are used and/or if they affect too many elements. Check for any .htc files lurking around.
Of course behaviors only pertain to IE and they use JavaScript, so I'm sure different IE versions handle them more competently than others.
There is a special tool for such scenarios called dynaTrace which is available for free at this website:
http://ajax.dynatrace.com/pages/
This tool could really help you out because its tracking almost everything and its specially build for IEs.
Check for memory leakage in the script.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/closuresleak/index.shtml
Steve Souders gives an excellent presentation on 14 (simple) steps to improve the performance of your web pages:
http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2007/08/steve_souders_high_performance.html
If it's hanging in the middle of the page, the first thing I would personally look to do is ensure or move all my JavaScript is at the bottom of the page.
IE is great at being a bad performer, particularly with JavaScript, so if you move it to the bottom, IE can render the page, then get on with processing the JavaScript.
I use HttpWatch for troubleshooting linked assets (images, script, css), network or HTTP related problems in IE. There's a free & paid version. Free is fine but you lose out on some nice features.