Adventures In Browsing Myspace!
Web browsing, for most people, is the most resource intensive computing activity they perform by far. Why is this? Because when you browse the World Wide Web, you download and render documents people have created. Yes, documents that everyone and their dog has created. The problem with this is that most of these people aren't web developers or even the least bit computer-savvy. And that really wouldn't be a problem if people didn't have the idea that the more graphics, animations, and cool effects they have, the better their page is.

Myspace.com, one of the worlds most highly trafficked web sites, is a place where you can find many extreme examples of poorly developed web pages. Today, I was browsing through the myspaces with glee, looking for old school buddies, hot chicks, and other curiosities when all the sudden, it happened. I was no longer able to click anything, select any browser tabs... my browsing came to a standstill. What?!?! What's going on here? I have a very light operating system (Linux with a custom kernel), a light window manager (Openbox), a light web browser (Opera), and a pretty beefy frickin' computer (AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 1.47 GHz and 512 MB RAM). I looked at my processes and noticed I was consuming 100% of my processor (the x.org process, mainly) and a lot of memory. What the hell? Do you need a gawd-damned Cray supercomputer in order to browse myspace.com?!?!

So then I took another sip of coffee and decided to find a solution to this. I mean, really, it isn't myspace users' fault for developing horrendous myspaces that would crash any Windows PC on the planet, regardless of how beefy the computer is. (Linux doesn't crash by the way, hehe. Just thought I would gloat for a moment. :-P) X.org, by the way, is the Linux graphical interface, by the way, and that was the process that was consuming all my processor power. This told me that my browser was trying to render something that was graphically complex. After about a minute of my computer chugging along, I noticed that the page I was trying to view was using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to lay some semi-transparent images over the page. Ah, another horrible abuse of CSS. CSS was originally designed to make web site maintenance easier and to conserve bandwidth on the user end, not to max out your processor and memory.

Then I looked around in my browser settings and discovered that I could turn off CSS. Sure, that removes much of the positioning of objects on the web page, so that everything is inline, and it also removes text styling and a few other things. However, the benefits are awesome. That is, pages render instantaneously. No more waiting, no more browser crashing, no more scrolling a web page at the speed of molasses in January. To do this in Opera, you click Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced tab -> Content -> Style options -> Presentation modes, select User mode from the drop-down menu and make sure Page style sheet is unchecked. So then, depending on whether you want CSS enable, you may toggle between Author mode and User mode. Isn't that spiffy?

And as a last note, if you want to really screw up your computer, just surf myspace with Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows. Don't believe me? Just try it... if you dare! If you use Windows, browse the Web with one of these decent browsers.