More and more often the up/down arrows either don’t work or they are sluggish. It’s like you’re scrolling text on a 9600 baud modem.
I haven’t been able to find a pattern. Some pages scroll fine and others don’t. News pages often scroll poorly with the arrow keys. Even worse is when the arrow keys don’t work at all. You have to click around in the white areas.
Sometimes. If I load a page and change tabs. Then click the Tab on the news page, (and nothing else) it will scroll correctly.
Last resort is the stinking scroll bar and mouse. I hate the scroll bar. :smack: That requires moving my hand, clicking and holding, it’s a PITA. It’s even worse on my laptop, using the touch pad pointer.
Google search page sometimes scrolls fine and other times doesn’t. Part of the problem is not knowing what is causing the problem. What is going on with the web page design? Are there any strategies that I can do to avoid the problem?
All right it took me a minute to figure out what you are talking about (I’m a web designer by profession) but I think I got it…sites are loading slow for you.
Few things going on here:
Web site designers (or rather the people that pay for Web site designers) are assuming that most people have decent machines and decent bandwidth and there is little incentive to make pages fast-loading. Or rather…mostly text.
Those are just some things, mostly images. There are other scripts too that I didn’t see right away.
Your Internet connection has to go out to each of those unique servers and get all of those different things that are being served up. Sometimes your browser also sends info back to those different servers. For the most part, those servers are serving stuff to millions of other Web sites at the same time you are connecting. Some servers are slower than others, which is why you will see things still loading while the page you have visited seems to be there already. Lots of times the tracking code (like Google Analytics, or say, a counter) is a bit slow.
Showing media like images as well as a stopped/paused video takes up more bandwidth than text. Embedded video usually relies on Flash to show you the still/thumbnail. This stuff also requires your video card to do a little more work than if you were just seeing text.
Sometimes your browser just gets overwhelmed. How many cookies you have and how full or un-full your cache is, how much processing power your computer has, your video processor, how much memory, whether or not your browser is buggy, whether or not the page itself is buggy, etc.
My advice is to use Firefox as a browser with AdBlock as an add-on. It will keep a lot of those extra calls to outside servers from happening, and at the same time keep a lot of those extra images (ads and widgets) from loading.
Apparently Chrome has an AdBlock extension as well but* in my experience* it’s not as good as the Firefox version, but then Chrome is to be a “lighter” browser than Firefox so it’s sort of a tradeoff.
I figured that’s what the OP was talking about. I’ve noticed this more and more too. While I correctly guessed at the cause, that doesn’t make it less frustrating.
If someone wants to Pit this, I’ll be right there complaining about restaurant websites too.
Thanks ZipperJJ.
I figured it was either scripts or Flash content. It looks like the page loaded, but there’s still lots of stuff getting called in the background.
I think Zipper nailed it. My first thought was that it was because all the graphics had to load, I figured this was the case as the scroll bar was shrinking. But then I saw popeater and facebook crap. That’s probably what’s doing it. On my web page for my store, I have a single facebook icon. All it does it is show how many facebook fans we have. After the site loads, it’s still several seconds before that populates. I’m sure if I had it set up to load 8 or 10 friends it would be even more sluggish. This, plus feeds from several other sites and you’re going to run into even more problems.
I’ll bet if you were to block all that stuff down the right with ABP, the site (and others like it) would be much smoother.
I don’t know about the OP, but I read it as having the same problem as I do. Which has nothing to do with pages loading.
After a page is fully loaded, no matter how long it has been on the screen, using the up or down arrow key moves the page not smoothly but in a series of individual steps with pauses in between. This is wildly and very noticably different than the usual procedure.
I know enough to watch for stuff being loaded that would slow a page down. This is in addition.
I just came to say that the page the OP links to scrolls fine with the arrow keys for me (FF 4, under Windows 7). I was lucky enough not to experience any undue loading delays on this occasion. (I guess we all have that problem sometimes, though.)
Is the suggestion that, on some pages, scrolling is slow with the arrow keys but OK by other means (mouse wheel, scroll bar, or whatever)? I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that, but then I rarely use the arrow keys to scroll anyway.
I find that a lot of sites will use these slow scripts that are hosted on too slow sites, as the main site gets paid for doing so. Most of them do absolutely nothing that the user cares about.
I suggest using NoScript, YesScript, or some other browsing solution to block the following sites, as you won’t even notice they are gone:
There are more sites out there that can be blocked with no real effect, but those are the ones that are used on the FOX example site. (NoScript doesn’t show its entire blacklist in any way I know how to check.)
Note: I also block some scripting providers on this site, but I don’t know if I should mention them. I will say that none of the providers on this site have good reputations, save for google-analytics.com, and all of them have at one point or another served malware.
I don’t notice any difference on this page compared to others when using the arrow keys - they move the page in small clunky steps. I tend to use spacebar and shift-spacebar or the page up/down keys to navigate when I don’t want to touch the mouse (which is almost always - I fucking hate the mouse with a passion).
Arrow keys are supposed to give smooth scroll on web pages or other apps like Ms Word or Excel. The small clunky steps you mention is the problem I’ve recently ran into. Heck even when I used a 56k modem in 2001, I got smooth scroll. But, back then there wasn’t so much crap to load either.
Note, You may have to click in the heading “Superman Renounces His Citizenship” to make it screw up.