Comments on: Yahoo! Search – new features, faster performance

By: Dan Coppen

Dan Coppen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:14:10 +0000

Thanks for the post, learned a lot from the series.

@sunnybear. thanks, waiting for your results. Great product, btw.

By: sunnybear

sunnybear — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:43:22 +0000

A lof of data:URI usage can decrease page rendering time, which is more important (in case of cached files) than HTTP requests reducing (that are also eliminated in case of cached files).

Cached views are about 70-80% by Yahoo! researches.

After preliminary tests data:URI was about 30-50% slower that raw images (for Chrome — 80-100x slower) and 80-100% slower than CSS images. I’m going to prepare correct test environment to track this.

By: Steve Souders

Steve Souders — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:01:06 +0000

@Sergey: Here’s what the original blog post said: “To maintain backwards compatibility, we provided a separate gradient-only sprite for IE6 and IE7. This means that those browsers encounter slightly worse performance than more modern browsers, but the net effect is still an overall win. Of course, managing a split code base is a little risky.”

By: Sergey Chernyshev

Sergey Chernyshev — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:12:42 +0000

Steve, data URIs are great for small interface images, no questions here, but what do you do with browsers that don’t support them? Does this mean you need to sniff the browsers for this to work and use different CSS files?