Oscar Carlsson wrote:
On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:59:05 -0500, chasd chasd@silveroaks.com wrote:
On Mar 12, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Oscar Carlsson wrote:
Hi everybody!
Till asked me to ask the rest of the devs about their opinion regarding http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1484858, "Speed up the interface loading by using CSS sprites for images".
It wasn't that long ago that everyone split big images into many smaller ones to make the page appear to load faster because there were many connections to the server. There are features in Photoshop / ImageReady to do just that. Seems there is a pendulum that swings between many small images and few large images. Will RC change again when this pendulum swings back the other way ?
With the speed of most Internet connections today, it's no the transfer that takes time, it's the connection. This wasn't the case earlier with slow modem connections, that's why it was better to split images then.
Take a look at: http://tools.pingdom.com. Try your favorite website. You'll quickly see that it takes a looong time from "Start" to "First byte" (look at "How it works" for color explanation), but transfering the image is fast. That's why this method is popular, it uses the connection speed better. Of course, this is only possible to use with buttons, logos and such static images, but there are many of those in RC.
We still have hundreds of customers that are still on slow dialup connections, and they're the most likely users of our webmail system. (Mostly when people with high speed connections forward them large e-mails with pictures and video that their modems can't handle.)
Unfortunately around here things are so spread out that there are huge chunks of area that have no broadband available, even via cellular or wireless. The best that some can hope for is ISDN, or a very expensive high-latency satellite link.
Not that the images would take too long to load either way, but it might be nice to give the admin a choice as to which is faster for their particular installation.
Given the choice though, I'd prefer to cater to the broadband users. It seems that most of our modem users have gotten very patient over the years and a little extra load time on a page doesn't mean a whole lot.
I do like the idea of caching the images while the user is typing in their username and password, though. They're sitting there typing anyhow and can spare a few moments.
Jim _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/