Alex Iskold – the giant brain behind AdaptiveBlue – has a great post up today titled How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It). While I’m sure no one has ever noticed how slow my blog (or Fred Wilson’s) loads (cough, cough, choke, choke – that would be sarcasm), there’s no easy solution.
In addition to describing the problem clearly, Alex suggests several approaches that make things better.
- Defer the execution of the JavaScript
- Minimize the amount of code that runs on load
- Load-balance requests by generating different URLs
- Use Standard Libraries
- Most Importantly – Think About It
I was in a meeting last week with Alex and a handful of other widget developers who are aggressively working on some interesting approaches and solutions to improve this. Look for new and improved stuff coming soon to a blog near you.