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The New Designer Templates Have A Downside

The new designer templates have been out, now, for slightly more than a month. And we're seeing some occasional reports about performance issues.
The new template downloads slowly!
or
The new template scrolls irregularly.
or even
It froze my browser!


Well, these are all real observations, and explainable ones at that.


Here's the "wallpaper" from my Nitecruzr Buzz. This is a full size (1800 x 1200) x 24 bit color photo. As rendered, my photo management program tells me that it uses 6.5M of RAM.


Traditional "wallpaper" would be maybe a 20 x 20 px snippet, at 256 colors (carefully muted), and tiled. Now we have color photos, 1800 x 1200 x 224, that fill the browser window. That will take a few seconds to download, and some power to display.

But, there's more.

The new templates feature the blog content housed in a transparent layer, so you can see the background beneath the content. As you scroll through the blog content, the background is displayed, in its glory. Your computer has to redraw the background, and the blog content, constantly, as you scroll. That takes computing power.

Watch the CPU trace in your system monitor, sometime, while you scroll your new blog. I just did. It's not pretty.

So consider the demographics of your blog readership, a bit. If your readers tend to use older computers, and slow Internet service (dialup even!), you might do well to look for a background that's lighter in resource use.

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Comments

Dudel said…
Blogger blogs, NOTHING.. there are professional websites that do that. My PC just can't handle it.

Two options, custom addblock (which doesn't always work on "the background images") or block all images, which can be annoying with buttons etc.

Please, fellow bloggers and internet users, don't shove a giant scrolling image behind your content. It makes a lot of us not even want to read your content.
Mary said…
Very good point, thank you: I'm going to be re-thinking at least one project I'm working on now as a result.

(Actually, I'm having enough problems with designer templates that I think I'll stick with Layout until a few more of the bugs are ironed out, at least for my "production" sites.
Penny said…
Well, I like the idea of the designer templates with the ability of adding a background. Wordpress has this feature and it is more successfully done, as well. My peeve with the template designer is that I can't add my own background my blog--or I haven't yet noticed that I can. If I could, that would be awesome. Now, another peeve is that the many--I want to say most--of the backgrounds Blogger offers (aside from being boring) don't fit. They only show the first 25 percent of the picture. How stupid...the best parts of the picture are off screen--like the birds pic...you only get--on my PC anyway--a few of them. Like, is there a way to reduce the size of those images? My fav is the default rain view overlay. I want to use it with a different background, but it doesn't seem to be available beyond being a default selection. I thought the overlay was a part of the Josh Peterson template and could be used with other backgrounds. (Sighing) I love, love, love that I can chose the shade of font and background post and link colors. That is soooo much fun. And I want more, more, more background selections--more fabric patterns, some marbling patterns, water without sky and beach, smaller scale photos that fit in the computer screen, and....
Queen007 said…
This is an interesting post.
Actually I'm not using the new designer templates. But anyway it was great to read.
rusdiansyah said…
what solutions to blogger that had already used template designer. can i get back to my original template. my blog getting soo slow now

ghiselnotes.blogspot.com

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