Bistro!: Bloated blog

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samedi février 10, 2007

Bloated blog

I've just added Snap to my blog. I'm not sure why I didn't do this before, I find it quite pleasant when reading people using links. I've been adding way to many things to this blog lately (Google Analytics, StatCounter, MyBlogLog, ...) and this page is becoming a bit bloated IMO and obviously it can't load as fast as a regular non-instrumented web page/blog.

FireBug 1.0 is a really neat Web debugger I've been using to debug some of my jMaki wanderings (more on that later) and I've found it to be very intuitive. It doesn't get in your way when you don't need it and when you do, you can easily drill down to the exact information you're looking for in no time.

I imagine most people use it to explore the DOM, debug JavaScript and CSS code (I try not write any), etc, but I found the "Net" profiling feature to be extremely helpful for debugging AJAX apps as it lets you see XMLHttpRequest calls and responses (including headers). Try it out on GMail, you'll be amazed (or shocked) to see all those requests flying by.

This feature can also serve as a network profiler. Here's what it shows on a simple page load of this blog:

Purple colored time-lines above are noise more than anything else. Time for some cleaning up...

OK, by way of popular demand, Snap is gone! I hope you'll like FireBug more than Snap :)
( févr. 10 2007, 02:40:27 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [8]

Comments:

I personally hate Snap. I find it intrusive and unnecessary. Here is a nice blog about this: http://performancing.com/node/5721 :)

Posted by Romain Guy on février 10, 2007 at 03:14 PM CET #

idem pour moi. J'aime vraiment pas Snap. Désolé.

Posted by Vincent Brabant on février 10, 2007 at 03:53 PM CET #

Allez, encore un ou deux commentaire et je vire Snap! :)

Posted by Alexis MP on février 10, 2007 at 05:30 PM CET #

@ Romain, Vincent. Let me explain my use-case. I often find myself hovering over links without clicking (tabs are nice but too many is too many and a feel of where it's leading is often enough). I felt Snap could be interesting when used with blogs that use links for fun...
. Maybe selective use of Snap would be better....

Posted by Alexis MP on février 10, 2007 at 06:05 PM CET #

I am at the same anti-snap bandwagon. Because it cause unecessary slowdown on page rendering. But I have the pleasant to have adblock plugin for firefox.

Posted by Claudio Miranda on février 10, 2007 at 09:06 PM CET #

I added Snap to my blog, and many of my readers complained loudly. See this rant by Alec. I turned it off after only a few days (and I found that page latency went down).

Posted by Geoff Arnold on février 10, 2007 at 09:08 PM CET #

I'm also one of those who got really annoyed by the snap windows suddenly popping up and covering the text I was trying to read. At least you can turn it off globally once and for all on the options page (but then I bet that also means they know a lot about peoples browsing).

Posted by Mads on février 11, 2007 at 05:34 PM CET #

OK, by way of popular demand, Snap is gone! I hope you'll like FireBug more than Snap :)

Posted by Alexis MP on février 12, 2007 at 09:49 AM CET #