Why Ajax Failed the First Time Around

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, February 8, 2007 @ 6:00 am

I guess everyone else has commented about Alex Bosworth's talk entitled Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why, so why shouldn't I? To summarize his points on Ajax, he says that Ajax didn't take off in 1997 because:

1. Trying to do Ajax over dialup was too slow.
2. Trying to run complex Javascript on CPU's of the time was too slow.
3. Deploying complex web GUI's with little customer support is a recipe for failure.

Now everyone has fast CPU's sitting on broadband connections, so everything is cool and the gang. Right? Not in my estimation.

I've been developing web sites and web applications (we called them "scripts" back then) pretty much since the beginning. From approximately 1997 until 2004 there were really two different contexts that I worked in -- Intranet apps running on uniform OS/Browser platforms over high speed LAN's, and Internet sites/apps running on heterogenous OS/Browser platforms and varying connections speeds. 1 & 2 were not really factors in the Intranet context, so why didn't it take off there?

In both environments we used the kind of IFrame-based proto-Ajax that most web developers are familiar with. We did it for all the reasons that people use Ajax today: it can reduce bandwidth and improve the perceived speed of the application. We tried to limit the complexity of our Javascript, partly for execution and download speed issues. But really, there was one reason we kept complexity low: IE in those days was a piece of shit.

The number of ways that QA tested code could fail in different versions of IE was mindblowing. My favorite was the order of installation bugs that kept cropping up, e.g. the order that Windows, Office, IE and other service packs and new versions were installed in could result in bugs that would wipe out a big part of your apps functionality. Try telling a big client that just migrated 15,000 users from Windows 2000 to XP that they need to do it over again because the order of install is causing your app to break.

BTW, #3 is a legitimate issue that is still with us. Until user experience standards and people's expectations for webapps catch up to the applications' capabilities, we're going to be in a situation reminicent of the early days of Win 3 and Mac OS -- everyone doing their own thing in the user interface arena to be "cool" or "different," and users bleeding from the ears because they are constantly learning entirely new UI paradigms.

Technorati : ajax, bosworth, editorial

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1. 

   I have no idea just check this one http://www.soongy.com

   Comment by Gevorg, Tuesday, July 31, 2007 @ 4:59 am

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