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Why is page refreshing so violent?

C

chrstrbrts

Senior member
Hi,

Sometimes refreshing a page is very fast and almost seamless.

But usually it's very disruptive; the whole screen seems to shake around.

Why?

Why can't page refreshing be smooth?

Is there something about the protocol stack that precludes perfectly smooth refreshing?

Thanks.
 
It is site specific, but there are a lot of reasons this happens (and there are ways around it).

The main reason for it is just the way that CSS, html, and javascript work. Whenever a new element is added to the screen, the browser has to do a lot of work to rerender the page correctly. A new element (depending on the CSS rules applied to it and its position) can cause all sorts of havok. It can increase the size of things. The width of other things, etc. If a page has a lot going on then new elements can be really invasive to the whole layout process.

The next problem is that on every new visit to a page, the browser doesn't get to remember what things looked like previously. It can only display what is currently there. This means that as the page loads, as the javascript does stuff, as the user's browser plugins start to kick in and twiddle with bits, as images are loaded, things will get jiggle, wiggled, and moved.

The problem is that webpages are not static beasts. They are dynamic moving interactive documents with somewhat complex layout rules. Because of this things move as new information comes in or as scripts start to run.
 
my ignorant answer would be "because the page wants to stay open". thinking that various components on the page are thinking that the page is timing out, or crashing, and so reload and try to stay alive.
 
Cogman said:
It is site specific, but there are a lot of reasons this happens (and there are ways around it).

The main reason for it is just the way that CSS, html, and javascript work. Whenever a new element is added to the screen, the browser has to do a lot of work to rerender the page correctly. A new element (depending on the CSS rules applied to it and its position) can cause all sorts of havok. It can increase the size of things. The width of other things, etc. If a page has a lot going on then new elements can be really invasive to the whole layout process.

The next problem is that on every new visit to a page, the browser doesn't get to remember what things looked like previously. It can only display what is currently there. This means that as the page loads, as the javascript does stuff, as the user's browser plugins start to kick in and twiddle with bits, as images are loaded, things will get jiggle, wiggled, and moved.

The problem is that webpages are not static beasts. They are dynamic moving interactive documents with somewhat complex layout rules. Because of this things move as new information comes in or as scripts start to run.
Click to expand...

To add to this... reloading a webpage is like restarting an application. Everything has to load, everything has to initialize, etc. If you want a smoother experience, consider a one page load javascript application. It's basically the way the web is moving.

http://singlepageappbook.com/goal.html
 
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