Browser SPEED

[dysfunctionGazz]

Please guys what browser is the fastest?

I ask coz I work in a call center and we service customer accounts using Internet Explorer on an ASP powered page which pulls details through to display in HTML from a mainframe database.

It is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO slow. We used to have a purpose built thing which was better but they decommissioned it.

The new thing doesnt seem to cache info so its constantly reloading things, it crashes if u double click or interrupt anything etc.

Im thinking that IE is not designed for this amount of data!!!
Could overworking the browser be a factor in its slowness?

If so is there a FASTER browser?

[brothercake]

Opera (http://www.opera.com)

[jkd]

I've had experience with K-meleon (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net) actually rendering and operating faster than Opera...

[bcarl314]

Are you sure the problem is with the browser? Any one of the following could be contributing to your problems.

Bad output HTML from the ASP
Overburdened database server.
Poor network set-up

I think I'd look into the 2nd one. I've seen alot of small / mid business use Access for a database server. Bad idea, I think it can only handle 10 simultaneous connections, so if you have more than 10 users, it'll hang alot.

Just my 2 cents worth.

[dysfunctionGazz]

thanks guys... anyone else got any opinions on this???

[dysfunctionGazz]

Im not too sure wot server we use...

I dont think its access. Im not in the computer dept, im a lowly phone operator but im just curious. im aware browser speed is not a major factor, but it does hang and crash a lot so anything to speed it up is worth suggesting to our technologies dept!!!

Its not a small co. tho : its American Express European Customer Services!

I think our database is an oldskool one, its text based, black background with green text, it looks like DOS really. You navigate around it with function keys and 4letter codes.

Hmmm...

[allida77]

I doubt this has anything to do with your browser or ASP. I work with Mainframe (db2) and do not have this problem. The problem probaly has to do with the comments bcarl314 made. I would tell the programmers or whomever about this and see if they care enough to fix it.

[ionsurge]

I agree with Opera.


Ionsurge.

[cg9com]

Originally posted by jkd
I've had experience with K-meleon (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net) actually rendering and operating faster than Opera...

:thumbsup: yes indeedy

[ionsurge]

<thinks>

Time to get K-Meleon....


</thinks>



Ionsurge.

[brothercake]

Yeah k-meleon is very fast; there's another gecko browser called Pheonix (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/) which also looks promising - like mozilla but without the chrome.

[bcarl314]

Originally posted by dysfunctionGazz

Its not a small co. tho : its American Express European Customer Services!



Oh, so it's a really small company! :D

[Roy Sinclair]

I'm going to take an entirely different tack, I strongly suspect that the problem you're seeing isn't a slow browser problem at all. It's more likely you've got a defective html problem. If the html returned is using tables to format the response and the response is very large and the widths of the columns are not specified the browser will end up waiting until the whole table has been received before it starts rendering the table. Adding specific column widths to the table would make the table render much quicker.

[allida77]

I'm going to take an entirely different tack, I strongly suspect that the problem you're seeing isn't a slow browser problem at all. It's more likely you've got a defective html problem. If the html returned is using tables to format the response and the response is very large and the widths of the columns are not specified the browser will end up waiting until the whole table has been received before it starts rendering the table. Adding specific column widths to the table would make the table render much quicker.

I never knew that. I am going to test this and see how much faster some of my pages will load.

[jkd]

Originally posted by brothercake
Yeah k-meleon is very fast; there's another gecko browser called Pheonix (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/) which also looks promising - like mozilla but without the chrome.

Still uses XUL, which is a performance hit.

Also, for MacOSX, there is Chimera, which is Gecko embedded in native widgets, much like K-meleon for Windows.

[ionsurge]

I dont like K-Meleon...



Ionsurge.

[jkd]

Perhaps you should explain why in their forums so that they can improve upon it? :)

[BrainJar]

I think our database is an oldskool one, its text based, black background with green text, it looks like DOS really. You navigate around it with function keys and 4letter codes.


That sounds like CICS, which is an application platform. I'd guess that the back-end database is DB2.

As bcarl314 mentioned, it could very well be the back-end that's holding you up.

Some things to check:

- Look at the size of the HTML pages that are generated. Big files (including images) take longer to download regardless of browser.
- Make sure your HTML is valid. If it's not, the browser will have to do extra work in order to render the page.
- Look at the HTML itself. If you use table for layout and have them nested several layers deep, it's going to slow the browser down (any browser).
- Use external .js and .css files where you can. Then the browser can cache them.

In your ASP:

- Do you open, close and reopen your database connection in a single script? That slows things down.

On the back-end:

- Check the database connection settings on both the web server and the database server. You should be able to find some documentation on how to configure them for optimum performance. It will depend on what software you're using - I'd guess DB2 connect in your case. Your network admins might be able to help here too.
- If your application does a lot of search queries on the database, see about adding indices to the columns you search on. That can speed up queries. If it is DB2, there are some tools that will help. Check with your DB administrator.
- Look at the SQL your app uses, make sure you're not doing unecessary joins. You might also try replacing some calls with stored procedures to improve response time.

As far as the fastest browser, I'd have to say Mozilla or Opera. The common myth seems to be that IE is faster, but I'd have to disagree with that just from personal experience.

But no matter how fast the browser can render your pages, it can't do anything until your web server and database server get those pages generated.