javascript be gone

Here's my latest gripe based on 3 experiences. It's highly annoying when developers create feature-rich web-based email clients that try to mock MS outlook.

Why does this bother me?

Because in an attempt to create all the UI niceties, the applications are encumbered by A LOT of client-side javascript. Now that's all well and good, but these applications bring my older-than-6-months PCs to a grinding halt!! This is javascript abuse! Granted my computers at home are each about 5 years old (a 1.2 GHz Athlon-based PC, and a 466 MHz G4 mac).

The three examples:

• company's intranet CMS system
• Yahoo! Mail beta
• Windows Live Mail beta (hotmail++ if you will)

These applications are beautiful and provide a great user experience with plenty of immediate and well-thought out visual feedback, but they bring my two home systems to a grinding halt. I'd probably see a performance gain if these email clients were deployed as Java applications.

So I'll leave the web-developers with this: don't abuse javascript, keep in mind that not everyone has a PC built in the past 2 years.