Todays Computers - Not So Fast

I used to tell everyone that todays computers are plenty fast for web browsing and email and word processing. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. With all of the web applications going AJAX and JavaScript crazy, the web browser can wreak havoc on your computer's performance.

Tonight while listening to some music with iTunes, I was scrolling an image up and down and every time it scrolled, it made iTunes hiccup. iTunes also barfed several times while I was editing this blog post when I held down a key for any length of time (scrolling or backspacing).

At work we use the Zimbra AJAX browser application. When I start it up on my home computer (an Athlon XP 3200+ w/1GB RAM), it hogs up close to 100% of the CPU for about 15-20 seconds. Let me repeat that, loading my web based email application hogs the CPU for 15-20 seconds. Once the email application is loaded, it it fast enough. The only problem then is it makes Firefox use lots of memory. These slowdowns are especially bad with Firefox because JavaScript is single threaded and all of the Firefox windows are running in the same process. So I can't even switch to another Firefox window while my email is loading.