Gmail causing personalized homepage to hang or crash IE

Slow loading Gmail affecting Google personalized hompage load time

[Marcia]

I love using the Google personalized homepage, but for an entire day this week it was impossible to open IE without it immediately crashing, so I had to change to another site for my IE start page - and even make sure I was logged out to *not* use the personalized page at all.

It was apparently due to a problem with fetching the Gmail posts, and though the "crashing" problem isn't now happening, loading the Gmail portion is causing the Google start page to seriously hang before opening - making it unsuitable to use as a start page, or even to use at all.

[Quadrille]

Microsoft, for some unfathomable reason, doesn't like Google very much, and so their software often gets indigestion with Google apps. It's no accident, or my names not Jack Ruby.

Google, on the other hand, works closely with Firefox - so gmail/firefox is a successful combination, where gmail/IE is a Pain in the Harris*

*If your name is Harris, please don't take this personally ;)

[plumsauce]

I would restate that as google is not very successful at writing code that works in IE. After all, IE is not a moving target, it is merely a consumer of whatever google chooses to feed it.

It has a *lot* to do with Ajax being fashionable.

Ajax actually requires coding skill to do well. A *developer* can not simply cut and paste chunks of recycled material as is possible with html.

However, what is happening in reality is that there are a lot of fashionistas chasing around to code snippet respositories and plunking the stuff into whatever page they can.

My personal observation is that lot of forums and blogs have been freezing up IE lately. The two main culprits are the message and comment editors in wordpress and vbulletin.

It might also be that chunk of code floating around for tracking blogs that a certain company released into open source.

Another big one is constant javacript warnings about a missing "}". Seems some ad network is serving up ads using code they didn't bother to QA. At least in IE. I guess they are too cool to use anything other than Firefox.

No, it is not my browser or machine setup. I spend all day on the web and I can pretty well predict which sites will freeze IE and which pages on those sites will cause it. If I did not need to go there I wouldn't because they *always* wedge IE.

For example, I have never had a freezeup on WebmasterWorld, nor my own sites, nor client sites.

Don't bother suggesting I switch to Firefox. I have Netscape installed for the email client and I hate the browser part with a passion.

What do I need with a browser that randomly decides it will work with edit/copy or sometimes with control-c or sometimes not at all? The further they move away from the original donated Netscape code, the worse it gets.

I have looked at the source code with the idea of extracting and fixing just the email client. It is, to put it mildly, a mess. Easier to start from scratch or with the imap c-client library.

.

[Marcia]

This is NOT an IE issue, it's a Gmail issue. Hence the post here in this forum.

At least 90%+ of the web = IE, which does NOT consist of bonafide GEEKS (as a matter of record) and is still using IE, and although problems are all too easy to blame on the browser, it's far more often a problem with the web pages themselves.

Please! We are not all total idiots! When everything else on a page loads just fine and one thing completely halts and hangs, it's pretty clear where the problem is originating from.

[edited by: Marcia at 11:50 am (utc) on Mar. 3, 2007]

[Quadrille]

When everything else on a page loads just fine and one thing completely halts and hangs, it's pretty clear where the problem is originating from.

Sure is. Clear as a bell. :)