Board Slowness, Browsers, Etc.

by Scott Novick , New York, Tuesday, June 29, 2010, 16:51 (68 days ago)

In response to JMO's thread below, I decided to link it up here (with some board magic ) so it stands out.

In going over the handful of emails I've gotten from posters about still having problems with the board loading, the common factor seems to be that all are using Internet Explorer 8. While this is the latest and greatest version from Microsoft, the folks in Redmond often do things in strange ways, and this appears to be one of them. There is obviously something about the latest version of the Forum software - the one Craig put in place to prevent those nasty MySQL errors that made people think they were banned or locked out - that IE 8 does not like. Craig tested it himself and also experienced the slowness, but we don't know what causes it.

Fortunately, over the last few years, new browsers have come out to challenge the Microsoft hold on web browsing in Windows, so you're not just limited to using IE anymore. I personally use two of these browsers almost exclusively, both at work and at home, so I can report that they are reliable, safe and fast, and the board runs very quickly on both. Those two browsers are Firefox and Google Chrome. You find Firefox here and Chrome here.

I know a lot of Mac users like Apple's browser, Safari. Craig installed an update recently that should address any performance problems on the board for Safari users. Please let us know if this isn't the case.

For Windows users, feel free to try out Firefox, Chrome or both. I hope you'll like them as much as I do, both for their speed and for features they have which IE does not. Best of all, neither product will replace IE. In fact you can even keep IE as your default browser if you want while trying out the new ones. Personally, I use Firefox as my default browser, but choose whatever is comfortable.

If you have any more questions, chime in and I will try to answer.