Vastly improved and easily customizable in Firefox

Report · May 07, 2012

The new forum is a vast improvement in terms of performance—it screams in comparison to the Jive molasses we had been putting up with and it's very easily customizable in Firefox through a number of scripts and AdBlock Plus.

The images below show what a customized topic index page and an customized open thread page look like in Firefox 3.6.28 (the last Firefox release to support a Power Mac PPC) look like, respectively. OS is 10.4.11.

These are very welcome changes.

Report · May 13, 2012

The fashion industry is immune to criticism and feedback. They are self-appointed leaders, and however horrendous things look they succeed. It's not about what makes sense... It's about substanceless influence and setting trends, and nothing about actual value.

The technical industry is dry and lifeless by comparison, and is built by people with common sense who care about value. But people with good sense tend to stick with what actually works, and that just gets old.

Unfortunately, old dry and lifeless doesn't sell things as well as fresh glitz, and so we have marketing folks who decide things like what icons should look like and whether buttons should be flat or 3D looking. And how much space should be left around the edges of forums.

We can only hazard a guess at who management has put in charge.

-Noel

Report · May 13, 2012

As it turns out, not all is lost. There is one good thing about this new design: all the wasted space is on the right side of the window, not the left. This means that you can expand the text size and/or shrink the window and will see only the thread on the left. No add-on required.

Perhaps the designers had this in mind when they appropriated 30% OF THE WHOLE WINDOW for their own idea of a process improvement, but somehow I doubt it.

-- Roy Zider

P.S. The typing of this message still has noticeable keystroke delay. Their efforts would have been better spent making impovements in performance. From the days of WordStar there has been better keyboarding of text input than what the user gets here.

Report · May 14, 2012

Has this happened to you before? There are issues with Firefox (not specific to this forum, but to the combination of add-ons installed) which can cause textarea inputs to experience delays.

FUBARinSFO wrote:
P.S. The typing of this message still has noticeable keystroke delay.

Report · May 14, 2012

Dave:

I'm using IE8, but the issue of add-ons would be the same. I've disabled most of my Startup programs, but startup services still has hooks. This has been a problem with this forum before, I think, as I note -- but I would have to see if and to what extent I've made note of this problem before.

My objection is to all the cruft attached to the web page by the designers -- just check out the javascript on some web pages sometime. And just saving this web page takes over a minute (1:30) and 100% CPU. The saved page is 3 MB (!!) -- I mean, really. This page has 68,076 lines of code+text in it. Give me a break.

WordStar with overlay was less than 100KB. There are 30 WordStars on this page alone, and yet is still sucks.

-- Roy

Report · May 14, 2012

IE9's "F12 Developer Tools" function reported 94 items in 138,997 bytes sent and a whopping 2,409,255 bytes received just to refresh the page on this very thread.

And that's with the various social networking crap sites most people see at the upper-right blocked.

It really is ridiculous how much needs to be done by the browser just to put up a forum thread. Note that more than one WordStar had to be sent in the process! Good thing I have a 40 megabit uplink!

-Noel

Report · May 14, 2012

Note the amount of data required to just display the parent page:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments

-Noel

Report · May 14, 2012

40 Mbit uplink -- 100X my uplink. No wonder the developers don't get the complaints they should be getting.

Turns out <F12> works in IE8 too.

Report · May 14, 2012

FUBARinSFO wrote:
40 Mbit uplink -- 100X my uplink. No wonder the developers don't get the complaints they should be getting.

Heh heh heh, and yet here I am. One should not HAVE to have a fiber optic internet link and a happenin' workstation to enjoy a mostly text forum.

Are you seeing the same upload amounts I am? With your 400 kbits/second uplink, just the data going TO Adobe.com will take 3 seconds!

By the way, I just counted (with help from an editor)... There are a little over 17,000 characters of text on this page, including the post I am composing.

-Noel

Report · May 14, 2012

Noel:

With 17KB of payload in a 3,085KB package, that would be a ratio of 0.551%, or 551 parts per million -- like CO2 in the atmosphere. Or alternatively, 181 X burden rate of total package to payload. Probably surpassed only by NASA missions to outer space.

I'm not tracking the traffic. I just saw the ref above to <F12>, but haven't used it (assuming that's where you're getting your numbers_

-- Roy