God I hate Ajax
I was typing up a blog post earlier today and after 15 or so complete 5-10 second freezes, my browser finally crashed. That was using IE 7. IE 8 is a whole different story (and so, not a very good one). So I started to think about how frequently my mobile browsing experience sucks. Every single day, several times, I'll run into a huge browser hang or some other performance nightmare that just makes my blood boil. If it was just once a day, it'd be one thing. If it was just on the desktop or the mobile device, it'd be one thing. But ever since the world decided that every single g-d page needs Ajax in it - the overall browsing experience sucks. And as I think more and more about it, how nice it was at first not to deal with Postbacks, I started to think "Maybe there's a GOOD reason Ajax didn't take off .... 10 years ago when it first came out."
Think about it for a second, there could certainly be valid reasons it happened, but why is it that Ajax was pretty much totally overlooked years ago when it first came out - and then 10 years later, Jesse James whatever his name is dubs it Ajax and the whole world is shaken. WTF? If it was really that awesome, wouldn't at least some significant portion of the market have realized it? So here we are today - where you simply can't escape Ajax. I mean, how many Flash sites have "Skip Demo" or "Non-Flash Site" available? Why can't the same thing happen with Ajax?
When i think about my daily browsing, Ajax saves me a few minutes a day. The Intellisense in Gmail is pretty helpful and I use that a lot. There are a few other places as well. But on the whole, when I look at how much time I lose to my browser hanging for seconds at a time, or from it crashing - there's no doubt I'm at a net loss. Now you might be thinking "But all those browser crashes aren't specifically from Ajax, it's not like browsers never crashed before". Ok, there's definitely some validity to that. But I know that I could count the number of times I got a "This script is running longer than expected" dialog box on my Pocket PC/Smartphone prior to Ajax. And yep, I get it every single day now, several times. And in every case I've bothered to look into, it was Ajax. I know on Community Server (one of the more frequent places), it's due to the Ajax loading on a few specific pages. And good lord, what happened to Gmail? I remember when I used to be impressed with how fast it was, as opposed to now where I tolerate how slow it is b/c I use Gmail for everything. When I log in now, I'd fall over dead if I actually got gmail to fully load in under 10 seconds... Thank God for the HTML only feature...something I wish a whole lot more sights would have. Or at least a "This sight contains Ajax, hahahahahahahahahahahaha sucker" so I could be forewarned.
And I know, it's not Ajax's fault. Since it became trendy to use, people are putting it everywhere. I am so old I actually remember when dev meetings centered around how fast a page could load as opposed to what features could be replaced with Ajax, but I digress. So it's the overuse and lack of alternatives that's causing the problem. And eventually it will work itself out. When it gets here, it won't be a second too soon.