Lightweighting the internet.com bar

[Merri]

The current internet.com bar in the top of the screen is very heavy. Combined with the top right advertisement these two things take often over half the time when loading a page when I'm using a mobile connection. It can take well over a minute to load a single page.

For example, this page on which I'm writing is 59.21 kB. This is a lot for a single page, and it is a lot even after compression (I can't remember if compression is used here or not).

Not only the page itself is long, but there are too many external files related to just that top bar:

• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/fsmenu_commented.js
• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menuset.js
• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menusetv2.js
• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menusetv3.js
• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/css/listmenu_h.css
• /icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/css/listmenu_h_settings.css

These could be combined to two files, one JS and one CSS. And both files could be compressed via an extra PHP that'd compress them; actually, you could just keep all those files and put in the PHP page that joins them together and serves the pages compressed. And I bothered to do all this for you:

<?php

header('content-type: text/css; charset=iso-8859-1');

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

echo file_get_contents('icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/css/listmenu_h.css');
echo file_get_contents('icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/css/listmenu_h_settings.css');

ob_end_flush();

?>

<?php

header('content-type: text/javascript; charset=iso-8859-1');

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

echo file_get_contents('icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/fsmenu_commented.js');
echo file_get_contents('icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menuset.js');
echo file_get_contents('icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menusetv2.js');
echo file_get_contents('/icom_includes/toolbars/globaltoolbar/scripts/menusetv3.js');

ob_end_flush();

?>

These two should already make things a lot faster to load, although you might want to add caching so that the page isn't generated from scratch every single time.

Thanks for reading and sorry for bothering, this just finally snapped me the other day when waiting and waiting and waiting for the page to load in a train and I finally got myself to write this post.

[brad jones]

We have talked internally about mobile versions of some of our pages that are a bit more lightweight and formatted to a smaller resolution. This is only a discussion point right now, but might happen at some point.

In the mean time, thanks for your suggestions.

Brad!

[Merri]

I'm using mobile connections via my laptop so making a separate mobile version doesn't really help, I'm still viewing in full resolution etc. - I'm just limited to mostly slow and unstable connections (when in train) or only slow (when not in a city with HSDPA connections).


Although I can see the slow loading even when using my normal DSL: first I get the top bar, then I get the ad, and then comes the rest of the page. Of course less than in a second, but it is noticeable that the site pushes a lot of extra data that it could put out much more efficiently