The Case of the Annoying new MSNBC.com Javascript
Johnny Dollar emailed in the following this morning…
There was nothing wrong with MSNBC’s transcript pages. Just text, no tricks.
Now, when I’m looking thru the MSNBC transcripts, a simple page of text becomes a video game. Only the first few lines are visible; you have to click on a button to show more text. When you do, the rest of the text appears: s-l-o-w-l-y. Then if I want to do a simple ‘find’ on the page to see if a word appears, instead of taking me to the word, I get all sorts of little tabs on the right hand edge zipping around, the page rolls (again slowly) up or down, and still doesn’t take me to the word. I have to repeat the find request to actually get to the result.
Just how is this an improvement over a simple page of text that you don’t have to do battle with?
This is what J$ is referring to. Click for full size image…
As you can see there are three tabs on the right of the window and a tab near the bottom of the page. But I didn’t see this at first because I was running Firefox with the massively underrated No Script add on. It wasn’t until I temporarily allowed all scripts to run that it showed up. A quick one by one elimination process of re-blocking the other sites that were being referenced in the HTML showed that it was a Java script from Microsoft.com that was the source of this issue.
There’s only one reference to Microsoft.com in the HTML so it was easy to find the script file that was causing this…
I then traced the script source back to something called Jquery.com which apparently Microsoft and MSNBC.com are now using under GPL rules to make their web pages more interesting. I don’t have a problem with the tabs but I agree with J$ that the animation slowdown is really stupid. Just put all the text up at once. Freakin’ Javascript…
