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.