Discourse is slow on Android. Why?
-
This is perfectly valid JS that works fine and performs reasonably on many platforms and browsers.. with the single exception of Android, where we see pathological 5x - 10x slowness.
Your users won't give a damn it's an Android thing though, because other sites will work ok for them. It's YOUR application that they'll see as the slow and horrible experience. Shrugging and pointing at Google isn't going to make them happier. Do you have any strategy to improve the Android experience in the mean time, until (or if) Google fixes this?
-
All of these goddamned mobile phones are faster than the computers we had back when the version of Community Server that ran the old DailyWTF forums was released, and that ran significantly faster than Discourse, at least when the tag-bloat was removed.
"But Community Server didn't use much JavaScript at all!"
Hm!!!
-
-
Yeah, but desktop ie11 is already 2x slower on desktop. Nobody really notices since desktop CPUs are so absurdly fast; it is 500ms vs. 200ms.
So as ie11 is known to be substantially slower, that's expected on mobile too. Hopefully ie12 will close the perf gap a bit more. (Of course that's what I said about Android as well, 12 months ago...)
And @killacoder, other sites that use large JS frameworks will also be slow for Android users. I think it is a fairly safe bet that a few years from now, more JavaScript will be used on the web, not less -- so Android needs to fix their massive perf regression, which I believe can be fixed in a new Chrome release. It is really odd since desktop Chrome is fastest, but Android Chrome completely shits itself to the tune of 4x to 10x slower.
-
So as ie11 is known to be substantially slower, that's expected on mobile too. Hopefully ie12 will close the perf gap a bit more. (Of course that's what I said about Android as well, 12 months ago...)
How many years before a different strategy is adopted?
-
I trust the IE12 team more than I trust the chrome Android team at this point.
But yeah if you asked me "will Android JavaScript performance improve in the next 12 months on faster devices?" a year ago I would have said yes.
Sadly that did not turn out to be the case.
-
I trust the IE12 team more than I trust the chrome Android team at this point.
And that's how you can tell that @codinghorror hasn't done any design work in several years XD
-
Sorry but I work on this stuff these days and frameworks like Ember and Angular (I haven't tried version 2) are just too heavy for mobile phones.
You know sod it, I am going to build my own framework that runs decently on everything.
-
The iPhone 6 is much more expensive than any of the Android devices.
-
16GB iPhone 6 = £539, 16GB Galaxy S5 = £519.
-
It depends how things are done in ember and how you are writing your JS.
If you want performance you have the avoid a lot of the nicer functional array functions and use optimized for loops. How are you using closures, because they are expensive, some lookups in jQuery are bloody expensive.
This stuff isn't a black box and I have a lot of "heavier" sites i.e. lots of graphics or not optimized for mobile run fine on my phone ... but your forum software is very painful to use to the point I am not bothering and have a phone capable of running android 4.
-
Really? Because the S5 build quality sucks in comparison. I know the Nexus 5 is older and far cheaper.
-
Really?
Based on the prices at Carphone Warehouse, yes. The first place I found which had them both SIM free.
Because the S5 build quality sucks in comparison.
It feels better built than it should.
And I expect the S5 battery life smashes the iPhone 6.I know the Nexus 5 is older and far cheaper.
It's only about 6 months older than the S5.
-
I know the Nexus 5 is older and far cheaper.
Unfortunately the trend of Nexus devices being flagships at half-price (basically) is now over with the Nexus 6 and 9giggity
-
The one guy that has the S5 in the office is constantly borrowing my charger. The S5 seems to be contantly caning the network thanks to all the crap they install (this is using a fiddler proxy).
-
Also being "regular sized"
-
Also being "regular sized"
I don't think they were ever out of step with the mainstream flagship sizes at the time of release. It would've been nice if they had stayed Nexus 4 sized (as did Motorola phones, IIRC) but they're just following the trend as they have been.
-
2 days 3 hours since I unplugged mine, 13% battery left with all power saving turned off and Wifi/Bluetooth always on. It's been used a fair bit too.
It's far better than the battery life on my Nexus 5 is.
-
Unfortunately the trend of Nexus devices being flagships at half-price (basically) is now over with the Nexus 6 and 9giggity
Seeing as the Nexus 6 is now on par with the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S5 for price, I wonder how it compares for performance.
-
I don't understand how that can be, I regular have to debug S4 and S5 problems and the S5 is first to die every single time and no the phone isn't in debug mode.
In any case, next time I am buying a phone it is going to be a iPhone just because the keyboard doesn't frustrate the hell outta me.
-
In any case, next time I am buying a phone it is going to be a iPhone just because the keyboard doesn't frustrate the hell outta me.
I use the Google Keyboard (the one that's stock on the Nexus 5) instead of the Samsung keyboard.
-
It is better but the default apple keyboard is miles better at getting it "right".
-
Swiftkey FTW.
For tablets, Thumb Keyboard is good
-
Have no issues with Google Keyboard. Swipe works well.
Used Swype on my old S3 but haven't found a need to change from the Google Keyboard on either the S5, Nexus 5 or Nexus 7.
The Samsung keyboard was more annoying, hence the swap there.
-
The samsung keyboard takes an age to even work on my S3 the google keyboard isn't much better. I can almost text/write as fast as I could using the old T9 dictionaries on an Apple phone. Though I admit that it is entirely subjective.
-
I never had much joy with Swype. I don't really use Flow, the swiftkey swipe system, that much either
-
Yeah, I didn't use either on my S3. The Nexus 5 and S5 are different beasts.
The Apple keyboard may be better but I've never used it so can't comment.
-
The Apple keyboard may be better but I've never used it so can't comment.
For the few minutes I used it, it annoys the hell out of me for two reasons:
- It's always in caps. The difference between lowecase and uppercase mode is too subtle to see what you're doing at a glance
- Getting to any special characters is a PITA. I don't remember how good the Google keyboard is on that front, but guess what? I can install a different one!
This may be skewed by the fact I usually had to use the iPhone to set up someone's email or WiFi, which naturally involved passwords, which are both case-sensitive and tend to contain special characters, but the points still stand.
-
Count me as another vote for Swiftkey. It's got a great learning prediction system, useful gestures (if you turn off flow typing), easy access to alternate keys, and some attractive themes (if you care about that sort of thing).
Edit: It's also resizeable, if you have one of those monster phones that doesn't fit in a human hand and don't want to reach all the way across with your thumb.
-
Because I love you, first results from my new Nexus 9.
Chrome beta -- 700ms
Chrome -- 750msThe standard deviation is really high (signs of the bug) on the order of 350ms, but still but these are great numbers for Android.
Android 5 is super nice, as big a change as going from iOS 6 to 7. Liking it a lot so far.
-
not surprising
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/08/11/tegra-k1-denver-64-bit-for-android/
-
It is still erratic though. I get sunspider score of 1 sec which is mediocre to poor, but a Mozilla Kraken result of 3.8 sec which is slightly better than ipad air 2.
-
how is firefox doing?
-
I have not checked but all previous results point to worse.
-
You can't build science with assumptions.
On my machine(Desktop)
Kraken JavaScript
firefox Total: 1506.9ms +/- 1.8%
chrome Total: 1550.9ms +/- 3.1%SunSpider
firefox Total: 200.4ms +/- 2.0%
chrome Total: 209.7ms +/- 3.4%
-
Sure we can. Desktop has none of the Android bugs for Chrome.
As predicted, Firefox is about 40% slower on Android:
925.43ms 936.85ms 153.29ms 1324ms
Std Dev is better though, substantially.
-
I am not surprised that firefox is slower compared to chrome on android, I was more curious as to how much better it performs with a more robust processor
Octane Test
http://octane-benchmark.googlecode.com/svn/latest/index.html
Firefox
Chrome
-
Edit: It's also resizeable
The LG keyboard (on the G3) is resizable, and has a pretty good swipe feature.
-
And that's how you can tell that @codinghorror hasn't done any design work in several years XD
Meh. If it were a little faster with JS, and used a bit less memory, it'd be a pretty good browser. It's been quite standards-compliant for a long time and does well on the ACID tests.
-
Ie10 and ie11 are very good browsers. Shame about ie9.
I hope ie12 is released soon to catch up a bit on js perf though. Would suck if ie12 was synced to windows 10 release which is a ways off.
-
-
The samsung keyboard takes an age to even work on my S3 the google keyboard isn't much better. I can almost text/write as fast as I could using the old T9 dictionaries on an Apple phone. Though I admit that it is entirely subjective.
I use Hacker's Keyboard. Looks nicer than the stock keyboard IMHO, plenty of keyboard layouts (even Dvorak!), the suggestion thingie, number of rows configurable depending on orientation, Compose key and other goodies.
-
In any case, next time I am buying a phone it is going to be a iPhone just because the keyboard doesn't frustrate the hell outta me.
I ditched the regular Samsung keyboard for the first reasonable app that gave me a Dvorak layout.
-
Would suck if ie12 was synced to windows 10
It probably will be. They may finish it early, but they seem to like not making a huge fuss over IE versions by releasing them at the same time as more interesting products.
...Meanwhile, the WP8.1 Wordflow keyboard is rather wonderful.
-
Of the 8 people in my office, everyone else has an i3 or an i5 except for my stupid Pentium e5700 that keeps on keepin' on, and a coworker with a similar-era laptop that also stubbornly refuses to die.
If you
wantneed an upgrade, you need to call in your friend, Static Discharge. ;-)
-
You know what the worst thing is? My coworker who got an i5 in March, had the HDD fry in July, and now the machine's acting up again like it's about to die. I need him to use my machine for a while!
-
Yesterday, I noticed that I'd gotten an email about a reply to one of my posts, and since I do pretty much all emailing on my phone and wanted to reply, I can now report how this site works on a Lumia Icon running the latest 8.1 developers build.
I'm shocked to say this but: It's slow, but usable. I've seen worse.
-
-
They could probably use it as a review quote
-
I hereby give my full permission to use that quote in advertising material.