Email conversation
| From | David Knopfler |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Thanks and query |
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| Date | 16 June 2007 16:08 |
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Hi Tarquin - I feel like I won a coconut just reading your reasons for not
contacting you and finding your email address in there! ;)
I'm impressed by your browser knowledge and amused by your realism re' Steve
Jobs's claims for Safari 3. Principle reason for writing is just to thank
you for your unpaid work in the field and to say I found it refreshing and
illuminating. I'm not a techie but I know enough to recognise expertise.
One kinda incidental question you might have a handle on, is why I can't
seem to get very far into Mypace.com on my OSX 10.4.9 Intel Mac without
everything grinding to a halt, whether I use Safari, Firefox, or SeaMonkey
they all take forever once I want to access music, or photographs, or pretty
much anything that isn't a surface operation. I thought I'd try Opera next -
but I don't hold out a great deal of hope. I get 1000s of requests for adds
and as things stand, I can't check out even 5% of them because, more often
than not, it feels like I'm using a 14.4 modem. I suspect the principle
culprit is choked bandwidth at the Servers end in conjunction with me being
UK based - but anything that helps me would be a God-send,
Best regs
David Knopfler
| From | Me |
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| To | David Knopfler |
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| Subject | Re: Thanks and query |
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| Date | 16 June 2007 22:20 |
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David,
> why I can't seem to get very far into Mypace.com on my OSX 10.4.9 Intel
> Mac without everything grinding to a halt, whether I use Safari, Firefox,
> or SeaMonkey they all take forever once I want to access music, or
> photographs, or pretty much anything that isn't a surface operation.
Well, MySpace is a collection of particularly dreadful Web sites. Not
commenting on the content (though there is plenty of low quality content on
there, but that could be said for many other places too), but the way pages
are made. Many of the default stylesheets and templates use combinations of
opacity, fixed backgrounds, long pages, hundreds of images, nested tables,
[Ed. ... animated backgrounds, translucent background images ...]
and plugins. None of these things are particularly kind to a browser, and
there is no shortage of pages that can punish even the fastest of them (yes,
even Opera is slow on a lot of them).
However, your problem sounds fairly specific, and the fact that more than
one browser shares the problem suggests that it is not a problem with the
browsers themselves. Note of course that Firefox and SeaMonkey are the same
browser underneath the chrome, so it is not surprising that they both share
a problem, but I would not expect the same actions to hurt Safari. If Opera
also has the same problems, then that will confirm my suspicions.
I think the problem is related to plugins. Since all Mac browsers use the
same plugins, it would make sense that they all share the same problems with
them. Particularly music players or image slideshows, are likely to use
plugins, so this makes it seem even more likely.
If you test in Opera, and it shows the same problem, you could try a couple
of things:
1. disable plugins; Tools - Quick preferences - untick Enable plugins (and
reload the page)
2. create a text file containing the following CSS, and save it as
whatever.css
* {
opacity: 1 !important;
text-shadow: none !important;
background-attachment: scroll !important;
}
table, tbody, tr, td {
display: block !important;
width: auto !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
Then load a MySpace page where the problem occurs, and use Tools - Quick
preferences - Edit site preferences - Display - My style sheet -> put in the
location of whatever.css.
Of course, each of those will make the page look wrong. The first will stop
plugin content from appearing, and the second will make the page layout look
wrong. But in either case you will at least know whether it is plugins or
general page design that is causing the problem.
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/