If you make your living on the Internet you notice every little bump and fart that comes along. It’s been farting alot this week for me. This odious phenomenon is marked by webpages that take their sweetass time to load, and it’s been happening on wicked fast work PCs and my more humble home set up. It’s aggravating to say the least. I probably open two or three hundred webpages every day, if each of them on average takes an extra ten seconds to load that adds up to a bunch of wasted time. On top of that pages have been getting hung up, as in stuck, won’t load at all, shutting down my browser and with it any work I have not saved. Which gives me another chance to ask the question that our Internet network geniuses can’t seem to answer: Why Are We Still Having To Suffer With Hung Web Pages in 2011?
On every page there is an “X” in the top right-hand corner. Clicking on it is supposed to close the page. One would think breaking a connection would be one of the simplest things a piece of electronics can do. But for some unfathomable reason, when the page is stuck loading and the computer paralyzed with the effort, the time when you most want and need that page to close more than any other, the X has no effect. Nothing, it’s like it’s laughing at you.
No problem, my PC tech people glibly explain, why just open task manager and close it that way! OK, first of all, why should we have to do that? Whatever it is task manager does, or is supposed to do, why not just have that happen when we click on the X in the first place? And second, that does not always work, too often the fucking thing throws up this amazingly asinine message saying “Not responding.” No shit? Yeah, that’s kinda why we resort to task manager in the first place. Or it shuts down the whole goddamn browser and there goes any unsaved work online, which can be enough to make a grown man want to beat that PC into little plastic bits.
Despite trillions of dollars in R & D over the last three decades, the hung web page still survives and manages to screw over millions of users every day. Why that happens remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in my day-to-day life.
It is all part of the conspiracy to soften you up for our new rethuglican overlords.
Bet I can tell you exactly why, actually– it’s Javascript’s fault.
For the non-technical, Javascript is the programming language used to make web pages do basically anything more active/complicated than display static niformation or let you fill in some text boxes and send them back to the server.
The thing is, Javascript has a single-threaded process model; that means only one thing can ever happen at a time. The next thing that wants to do some work has to wait. Now, as Javascript is *defined* that only applies within the environment defined by each particular page. However, because browser programmers have taken some shortcuts (sometimes lazy shortcuts; sometimes compromises with other requirements that seemed like the right thing at the time), the entire browser often has to wait.
Most Javascript is written with all of the above in mind so that the interface only gets locked up for milliseconds at a time, and you never notice it. However, sometimes people screw it up and start some bit of work that never really finishes. Everything else in the browser has to sit around waiting for that code, including the code that is supposed to shut the window down. (Which *is* very simple, but it doesn’t matter how simple your code is if it doesn’t get to run.)
The good news is, the problem is recognized now. Chrome’s got a fix for it; Firefox should have one as well in the near future.
Oh, and:
Yeah, that one is way stupid. There’s a way around it, though:
1) Open up the task manager and find the program.
2) Right click on the program and select “Go to Process”
3) Click “End Process”.
That does a harder shutdown that won’t take any guff from frozen programs.
(The reason Windows doesn’t just shut everything down that way is that it’s not healthy in the long term. It’s too abrupt and leaves a lot of cruft behind. The healthy way is like telling a roommate to pack up their stuff and leave; the fast way is just changing the locks on ’em and cleaning up their mess yourself.)
“That does a harder shutdown that won’t take any guff from frozen programs.”
as Stephan clearly wrote:”And second, that does not always work”
when you really need it – the task manager is worthless for ending frozen programs…
switch to a real OS
Install chrome, add session manager
Now, even when a tab crashes and you have to go to task manager to kill it, when you relaunch it will reload the pages you had open.
Tomwalters, what he “clearly said doesn’t work” is a different mechanism. “End Program” on the first tab is what he was talking about; it does the same thing as clicking the X on a window, stupidly enough.(“SIGTERM” in UNIX terms.) “End Process” on the third tab does the harder shutdown I was talking about. (“SIGKILL” in UNIX terms.)