[bartread]

I may get flamed for pointing this out either by people who are offended by the viewpoint, or by those who find it so bleeding obvious as to not be worth stating, but those page hangs (and I know exactly what you mean) are really down to poorly architected and implemented front-ends rather than an inherent flaw with JavaScript-heavy apps and pages.

Any time you do an XHR you can supply both a success and a failure callback and, if you care at all about your users, the failure callback can come in handy for error recovery, handing off to a retry mechanism, etc.

Modern web apps can be a lot more like fat client apps, just running in a browser. Even there, there's no inherent need for them to be unusable, even over relatively slow connections. A lot of it comes down to latency, and the number of requests going back and forth between client and server, often caused by the sheer quantity of assets many sites load (I'm looking at YOU, almost every media site on the Internet).

I seem to spend my life citing this paper, from 1996, but "It's the latency, stupid" is still relevant today: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html.

[btbuildem]

Nothing controversial here, it's common sense. Most web stuff is built by total amateurs figuring things out as they go.

[dormento]

I'd like to complement: most _stuff_ is built by total amateurs winging it.

[coldpie]

Nonsense, email is an impressively well designed and logical protocol ;)

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