Browser performance
Today a user called and complained, that their WebMail is so slow and they want another solution.
That's a normal reaction.
There's always something better isn't there? - or - the analogy - my computer is weird, let's re-install !
NO - as a sysop, technician, programmer and curious one too - I always want to look under the hood. As a teenager I did take things apart, frequently too, resulting in a number of loose screws when trying to reassemble an old car, my bike, the lawnmover, chainsaw, another lawnmover - and so on.
SO - what to respond to the end-user with the slow webmail. They do experience a problem, and of course there is a solution, or multiple - but first what is the cause or causes? Without knowing the cause, why take action.
EXAMINE - is what I did. The inbox contained 650MB and thousands of e-mails - over IMAP - now that's slow no matter what server/client solution we'd choose. Other reasons, massive amounts of folders.
CURE - Organize!, throw out the old - do a traditional cleaning. No one likes to live in a mess, with years of old stuff - that's why we clean our homes regularly. So keep the inbox clean, only with the messages that you need to work with/reply to. Catalog the rest, off the server in the client imap. If you worry about backup - you can always synchronize a local client IMAP folder with the server folder at any time.
BROWSERS matter too - and in this case, as well as with this community site - webmail today depends heavily on javascript. So I did a quick search, and remembered a company name/brand (dunno) futuremark that we used way back to benchmark. And they showed up with this do-it-yourself test at http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/ which I couldn't resist in testing. The traditional overall results rank the browsers like this:
but is that really interesting to me? -
NO - what I use is not javascript graphics to any extent, but data and text. So the community index is much more interesting (besides compatibility of-course) and then the results are quite different. So here comes my rank:
| Rank |
Browser |
CommunitySpeed |
text parse |
data |
average |
FutureMark Total |
| 1 |
Safari v4.0.2 |
1732 |
2557 |
2880 |
2390 |
2129 |
| 2 |
Chrome v3.0.195.6 |
1662 |
2455 |
2455 |
2191 |
1789 |
| 3 |
Opera v10.0 |
1591 |
969 |
489 |
1016 |
1138 |
| 4 |
Opera v9.64 |
1490 |
476 |
503 |
823 |
836 |
| 5 |
Firefox v3.5.2 |
1302 |
895 |
1663 |
1287 |
1196 |
| 6 |
Explorer v8.0 |
504 |
561 |
424 |
496 |
480 |
FINALLY - does the javascript perfomance mean all? - no of course not - many more aspects of your favourite browser is of importance, and they're not all that compatible with standards, and thus behaves differently. But the test shows one very interesting aspect - different browsers do different things with differing speed and quality, and since we have the possibility to choose, why not choose the tool in each circumstance that does the job best, especially since they do not cost you a thing.