Some CNN.com web pages are too slow

Since CNN.com switched to their new design (which I like it a lot) the user experience has been dramatically improved. Of course, this all comes at a price.

I noticed several things that make it slower compared to what it used to be:

• The new "widescreen" video is too slow. It uses Adobe Flash to stream video, like YouTube does, however it is considerably slower, probably due to higher quality.
• It has way too many Adobe Flash components embedded into the page.
• It makes heavy use of javascript to "animate" some elements using DHTML.

Here is just a small group of areas in a CNN.com page. These areas use JavaScript and Adobe Flash.

The use of this technologies while improving the user experience, it also results a considerably slower rendering of web pages. However, there was a design decision that had a dramatic impact on some pages and renders them ridiculously slow: long list of comments using AJAX.

Some CNN.com pages (like this one) invite the users to post comments (see screenshot below) these comments seem to be requested at run time using AJAX techniques.


If the news topic is a rather polemic one or if it touches the fiber of too many people enough to make them feel compelled to post a comment, it is just a matter of time before the page becomes unbearably slow.

The issue can be experienced in IE, Firefox and Safari.