Comments on: Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift

By: Web Design NY

Web Design NY — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:47:49 +0000

This is the way to go when you make a product… You must try to reach perfection.

@brain, you can always use the HTML UI or just use a POP3 client, it would be a lot faster.

By: Uriel Katz

Uriel Katz — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:29:48 +0000

@brain:did you disable firebug? it eats all your memory when it tries to log all XHR requests

By: brain

brain — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:00:38 +0000

interesting article and a more in-depth follow up would be stellar. One thing i’d like to here more about is memory management. Gmail really eats up RAM, at least as far as firefox is concerned. I’ve never encountered a situation where I wished Gmail was “faster”, there have, however, been many times where I wished it was lighter (as far as memory usage, not JS payload).

-cheers

By: Mark Holton

Mark Holton — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:54:40 +0000

awesome post, thanks, Dion. This is the type of post I love — Engineers sharing their own insights into what they do, how they do it, etc. …I can’t wait for Gmail to be Gears-enabled as well.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:37:15 +0000

Oh, and additionally, I doubt Microsoft would really mind Google making its products work better in IE, so MS doesn’t have to do the work themselves of making JS perform better. I bet they turn a blind eye.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:34:16 +0000

Hmm. So a Google Engineer reverse-engineered jscript.dll. I am not so sure the DMCA covers this. And i doubt MS gave written agreement to Google.

Is it illegal under DMCA to reverse-engineer something for the purpose of learning how it works, while building something against its API rather than building something that implements some or all of its features?

Like, there’s a huge difference between (I think this is excepted in the DMCA but it’s just illustrative of my point) reverse-engineering a microprocessor to build a compatible microprocessor, on the one hand, and reverse-engineering a microprocessor to write a better-optimized compiler, on the other.

By: lhe

lhe — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:23:30 +0000

Hmm. So a Google Engineer reverse-engineered jscript.dll. I am not so sure the DMCA covers this. And i doubt MS gave written agreement to Google.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:52:07 +0000

As far as speed improvements… I don’t know how much benefit I’m going to see. I have never, ever, found myself waiting for responses from gmail on anything but search for more than a tiny fraction of a second, and I’ve never felt anything resembling lag, except when I’m having network trouble besides.

I’ve been generally impressed by Gmail’s speed. The launch could be a bit quicker, but I really only launch every time it logs me out.

By: James MacFarlane

James MacFarlane — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:18:40 +0000

This kind of programming reminds me of my Commodore 64 days. Every byte counts. Every clock cycle counts.

By: Jesse Kuhnert

Jesse Kuhnert — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:14:30 +0000

Hehe…you guys are completely insane. Nice work. ;)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:44:33 +0000

That’s great, gmail is kind of laggy sometimes. I hope they spent some time lowering the login time as well because that’s the one that’s been bothering me the most.