Happy New Year From Google

Good morning. Today is a slightly different topic I think. I wanted to cover something which was a little different. I guess its a result of our recent application development projects that we have been working on.

Ok so lets cut to the chase. When it comes to processing power and the web browser, not much has an impact on it, seeing as most web pages consist of text and images. When you add javascript and flash to the equation, you let loose your processor to process complex animations. One thing I’ve noticed with this is that they can often cause a spike in CPU usage, in fact not so long ago I visited a website which belonged to a Car Manufacturer, which had a special offer on cars, but the flash must have been so poorly written that it lagged badly. It even made my window lag when moving it about the screen. When I checked my processor usage it was spiking at 99% cpu usage when slides were running in the animation.

Now what I think probably happens is that because there is a lack of understanding from users, IT mangers and other web professionals except those who create these flash & javascript animations about impacts on the user experience – programmers are getting lazy. They probably think well “no one is going to notice” – so why should they improve it. But the truth is, people do notice, even if they don’t realise they are. Everyone has had a browser crash, a tab crash from time to time and I bet if you were to go back to these site crashes you can attribute it to some bad coding.

To bring this to a recent experience, here is a screenshot of a Google easter egg, which when you clicked the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button with no search entry, you’d see a lovely javascript animation. Only trouble was, due to the repeating nature of the animation, this caused my cpu to spike. I actually forgot to close the tab and when I got back to my computer a few hours later it had crashed my browser.

This got me thinking, so I investigated and found that it was using up to 70% of my CPU, whilst I was doing absolutely nothing else. I was struggling to get a screenshot, but here is what I was able to get.

As you can see, it was spiking at 44.5% Cpu usage, but actually did go much higher.

A few weeks ago, me and the guys in the office were looking at a video on youtube, which was lagging like crazy, absolutely mad. We couldn’t figure it out straight away. But after a little investigating then, we realised it was an advert on Youtube, which used flash, and was lagging the page out – See even then it had passed the advert quality control.

Anyway, not sure where I’m going with this. I just think there needs to be more awareness and I think you could probably attribute 90% of browser crashes to bad flash and javascript. However I do think that browsers should have coded in a good enough failsafe by now to stop them even spiking that high, or at least show a warning or error message.