Comments on: How perceived speed matters, and can kill you

By: Brian Reischl

Brian Reischl — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:55:03 +0000

Hi guys,
I’m a developer for NewsGator. I’m not on the product reviewed here (NewsGator Online), but I am on IM with the manager of that team right now. So I’ve got a bit of insight. :)

First off, we do appreciate the feedback, even if we wish it were better. Admittedly the site can be a bit slow, especially when you have a large number of feeds. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while, but unfortunately we’ve got a lot of irons on the fire (some of which we actually get paid for ;) so this hasn’t gotten as much attention as it maybe should.

That said, the Online team has some very cool stuff in the pipeline that should fix the problems mentioned in the article. I can’t give a timeline, and even if I did it would surely change. But hopefully it’ll be out “Real Soon Now”, so please come back and check us out in a little bit.

By: Hubris Sonic

Hubris Sonic — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:37:42 +0000

also this friggin tipco ad is slowing this site down… geez… flash blob much?

By: Hubris Sonic

Hubris Sonic — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:36:32 +0000

I find the same problem with istockphoto..

ajax doesnt have to do EVERYTHING….

in istockphoto when i click on a lightbox to display its really slow… its the ajax display thats slow…

its not for generating pages guys!

By: Tobie Langel

Tobie Langel — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 07:51:52 +0000

Talking about perceived speed, I’ve also noted that (excessive) use of graphic effects (fades, spinners, etc) tends to create a much less snappy interface. I believe they should be used only when really necessary. For example, indicating an asynchronous save after reordering sortables is often useless (its the expected behavior anyway) and just makes the application feel not very responsive.

By: Roberto R.

Roberto R. — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:40:15 +0000

Bloglines is really, really ugly but it’s fast, reliable, and gives support to multiple languages. I hope that the newsgator guys take note, because this market is really hard.

By: wioota

wioota — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 05:05:50 +0000

The people over at Yahoo! have obviously been concerned with improving percieved performance as indicated by their well-researched articles recently on browser-caching and concurrency issues of downloading webpage assets. Just adding AJAX will not provide the silver bullet. You should start with effective caching both client and server-side and also analyze the cost of downloading a page’s assets with a tool such as Firebug.

By: Spencer Akers

Spencer Akers — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:29:11 +0000

http://newshutch.com, fast, usable and beautiful. Definitely my reader of choice.

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:46:25 +0000

I was expecting to read a “moral of the story: don’t drink and code” joke (zing!) here, but I found it sorely missing.. ;) Ah, nerd humour.

Perceived performance becomes crucial when you have an expensive operation to run (either client or server-side, the former being usually more complicated) and have to show loading/progress of some sort. Sometimes I think it’s efficiency of client-side code which can be improved, and others it’s changing the routine such as loading and processing less data at a time, rendering bits of the page incrementally, etc and showing feedback to the user which can make the difference.

By: baldo

baldo — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:18:49 +0000

I made the switch yesterday (from newsgator to google reader)

By: sas171

sas171 — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:54:18 +0000

Same situation as by joe. I hope NewsGator folks will read this blog entry.

By: Dougal Matthews

Dougal Matthews — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:38:03 +0000

I find the windows live mail (new hotmail) horribly slow. Also, deleting things is a real pain. trying to maybe 5 or more emails at once sometimes they suddenly all dis-select etc.

I hate it.

By: joe

joe — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:17:49 +0000

completely agree. I was a longtime bloglines user because it was fast and usable, but I was never happy with the interface – it’s just plain ugly and very 1998ish feeling. I went over to Newsgator and tried it out and was impressed with the interface, but was annoyed at how sluggish it was to do even the simplest of tasks. I used it for about 2 weeks because I really WANTED to like it, but I just couldn’t – it simply took too long to read my feeds and perform mantainance. I was literally within 1 day of going back to Bloglines when the new Google Reader came out. I immediately switched to them and haven’t looked back since.