[se85]

Interesting design concept - but a horrible implementation of it.

You can't just go and load a thousand divs and not expect a wide variety of performance issues across all the different platforms.

You need to have a tile manager or something behind the scenes the same way that Google maps does, especially when targetting smaller consumer devices with limited hardware specs like tablets and phones.

* iOS5 - with an iphone 3gs (laggy to the point of being unusable)

* iOS5 - with an iphone 4 (laggy to be the point of being unusable, unless your patient). I don't have an iphone 4gs to test on, but I suspect it might be more on par with ipad 2 performance. The differences could be to do with retina display vs non retina display as well I suppose.

* iOS5 - with an iPad 1 - roughly same performance as an iphone 3gs - crappy

* iOS5 - with an iPad 2 - not too bad (but thats because of the gpu tile rendering in safari going on behind the scenes i suspect.

* Firefox 15 on a quad core i7 imac - massive ram spike, and crazy lag with the scrolling

* Chrome on a quad core i7 imac - no problem.

I'm not even going to bother trying this out in IE!

edit: Latest version of Opera has provided the poorest results yet, it keeps lagging and pausing and reloading the images after they have already been loaded (didn't check to see if it was actually downloading them again though)

[eckyptang]

It works very well in IE9 (both desktop and WP7.5). Perhaps you should try it before you slate it.

[se85]

I understand that IE9 uses the GPU to render the DOM.

That would help vastly with things like this, unfortunately it does little for its JavaScript performance, but since this page doesn't seem to execute any JavaScript during scrolling (i think) i guess it's not relevant for this one edge case scenario :-)

[eckyptang]

I think you're confusing IE9 with IE8.

[se85]

Nope :-)

[rogerbinns]

Chrome on Linux (with 16GB RAM) - works fine.

Chrome on Android 4.0 (Galaxy Tab): Takes about 30 seconds and then I just get some text and a picture of the car. Chose 'Request Desktop Site' and it is fairly close to desktop experience. Sometimes you get bits of white page as it brings the images in.

Builtin browser on Android 4.1 (not Chrome): I had to request desktop site again. Almost usable. There are always images displayed, but drawing after using your finger may take a second or two.

Safari iPod Touch 4G iOS 5.1 - sporadically somewhat usable for one touch interaction.

[se85]

Thats fascinating that Chrome on Android is capable of delivering the desktop experience of this concept even with the limited hardware specs of the Galaxy Tab.

I wonder whats so different under the hood of Safari Mobile on iOS 5 vs Chrome on Android 4 to deliver such different results, maybe its a hardware thing with tablets vs phones?

[rogerbinns]

What do you mean by limited? It has 1GB of RAM, a dual core 1GHz ARM processor, and just shy of a megapixel screen. As someone else calculated there are around 30MB of images. Quite frankly this should work out okay. (To my knowledge the iPhone platform tends to be skimpier on the memory. But then again there is less multi-tasking going on to soak up the extra.)

IIRC there was some past differences in iOS versus Android. Something like iOS prerenders the page to series of tiles so that as you scroll around it is really just showing tiles (think of how Google Maps works) while Android has a display list that is culled to the viewport and then (re)drawn as appropriate. But both sides were updating and changing how they did things.

[jervisfm]

I tried loading this on my android tablet running chrome and it worked reasonably well. The initial load took a moment to load all those images but after that I did not have any real issues scrolling. I am honestly surprised by reports from others that this webpage brought their machines to a near crawl especially since it worked fine on my tablet.

[wukkuan]

iOS5 - with an iPhone4S - Worked fairly well and tolerably fast, but not particularly smooth. Took a while to load initially, too.

[ams6110]

Safari 6 on a 2.66 Ghz MacBook Pro... jerky

[ralfd]

I presume Safari was the same as Chrome?

[human_error]

Safari 5.1 here. I viewed the site without any problems.

[se85]

Not sure. My safari is completely broken at the moment (my fault!)

[MaysonL]

Safari 6.01 Webkit nightly build worked fine.