October 30th, 2008
did you know?
Slower M2U do you know why?
Surfing towards Web 2.0 today, Maybank has taken initiatives to upgrade it’s online banking site – Encik M2U. But we as a maybank banking user finds it utterly slow although its nice for our eyes to lick it (Eye-Candy lah…)
Maybank should be well awared that although AJAX could bring some fancy user interface experience, as a trade-off, it greatly reduce the web application loading speed. Even great application from Google such as GMail which started to use AJAX extensively recently also experiences the same problem, and that’s why Google has made available a special link to access GMail without AJAX as a backup plan for their users.
The slowness intensifies over secured SSL connection, which is a must for the bank online services. There is also increase vulnerability for the server to encounter Denial of Service (DoS) Attack, since even without attack, the service is already close to useless due to time-out respond time.
In addition, AJAX application performance is largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. This mean, the user’s web browser play an important role in the AJAX performance too. AFAIK, Safari performs much better than Firefox in handling AJAX, and Firebox performs much better than IE 7 in handling AJAX. Unfortunately, I’m sure they have the most users using IE7, and least users using Safari.
Therefore, too much of AJAX on any website (or a full-Ajax-enabled website) is not a good idea.
And also the developer is using mootools javascript framework which is 63kb in size, which is a bad idea for starters, owh c’mon using large sized file for a online banking web apps is a big NO.
AFAIK, jQuery is better for both trade-of between functionality and nice animation
and the size is quite acceptable.
the size for 3 current leading javascript framework is 15kb, 63kb and 125kb (jQuery, mootools and prototype respectively).
For online banking secured SSL connection itself already puts the heavy loads on the server itself to handle a simple online transaction.Thus full AJAX on encik M2U is really a bad idea.
Maybank2u must find ways to resolve this problem, either to reduce usage to AJAX, or invest more money in upgrading their network equipments and servers. Luckily, they still maintain a link to fallback to their previous website interface. Not so fancy, but at least usable.
footnote : I always stick to the smallest framework, acceptable loading speed and quite good animation with some help from CSS, if you know what i mean *wink*
