![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A lesson in optionality
[Side-note: I haven't been posting much. Sorry: work's been eating my brain, and I don't want to bore people with a complete excess of CommYou stuff.]
Facebook's latest feature is built-in chat: when you're in FB, there is simply chat *there*. It's not something you turn on -- it just sits at the bottom of your window. And you Can't Turn It Off. (Far as I can tell.)
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that it's taking up about 60% of my CPU, far as I can tell. I was initially worried that something in CommYou was running out of control, but no -- it's just as bad on the Facebook homepage. And since Chat is their new feature, I rather suspect it's the culprit.
Moral of the story: features that the user can't turn off are *bad*; cute features that they can't turn off are worse. A lesson for me to remember in CommYou...
Facebook's latest feature is built-in chat: when you're in FB, there is simply chat *there*. It's not something you turn on -- it just sits at the bottom of your window. And you Can't Turn It Off. (Far as I can tell.)
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that it's taking up about 60% of my CPU, far as I can tell. I was initially worried that something in CommYou was running out of control, but no -- it's just as bad on the Facebook homepage. And since Chat is their new feature, I rather suspect it's the culprit.
Moral of the story: features that the user can't turn off are *bad*; cute features that they can't turn off are worse. A lesson for me to remember in CommYou...
Re: Huh
If it's in JavaScript, the source is sitting in your cache.
You could deliver something in Flash or Java that maintains a persistent connection, so that you can push stuff down to the client. 'Course, that means a lot of connections on your end, which gets expensive.
Re: Huh
True, although we'll see if that's useful. It is quite possible to obscure Javascript to a fantastical degree -- some of the better compression programs produce output that could win an obfuscated-code contest in a walk. (At the highest compression levels, the results have left me scratching my head at the idea that it could even execute.)
You could deliver something in Flash or Java that maintains a persistent connection, so that you can push stuff down to the client. 'Course, that means a lot of connections on your end, which gets expensive.
Yeah, that's not likely to be practical. Current plans are for variable-speed polling, sensitive to the context and nature of the conversation...