Great article here about basic client-side web site performance problems. I happened to read it in this month’s hardcopy version of Communications of the ACM, and immediately thought, “wow, this is one of the best articles this magazine has ever run.” No joke.

What’s really cool is the analysis of how the top browsers, particularly IE and Firefox, parallelize content downloads and rendering, but that common page implementation mistakes get in the way. Simple stuff like where you should put style sheets (at the top) and where you should put scripts (at the bottom).

Also interesting is the analysis of the top 10 sites and how they’ve made many of the mistakes described in the article. For example, when cached content is available on the client, both Google and Live search are 100% server-bound (which is good).

In contrast, the MSN homepage is only 6% server-bound, implying that the browser is having to perform a lot of work before the page is finally rendered. Now, to some extent, that seems expected to me, since search engine results pages are quite barebones these days (not that they should be; they just are). Whereas the MSN homepage can’t afford to be barebones. But the question is, can a top 10 site really not afford to be 100% efficient?

The MSN page isn’t the only offender, either. Read the article …

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