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IE11 "freezes" (for several seconds) when loading large pages from latest WikiMed #594

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Jaifroid opened this issue Feb 25, 2020 · 3 comments
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@Jaifroid
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I thought this was a problem with #589 (Promise refactoring), but it turns out to occur on Master as well. When loading pages with a number of stylesheets from wikipedia_en_medicine_maxi_2020-02.zim, IE11 freezes for several seconds during the loading process. Even the UI spinner is frozen (it is a CSS spinner), which perhaps implies that at a very low level it is trawling through many stylesheet rules and getting clogged.

The same page loaded from wikipedia_en_all_novid_2018-06.zim loads much faster, with no freezes, even though the pages seem to be substantially the same.

Steps to reproduce:

  • Load IE11 from index.html (I have tested this from the file system);
  • Pick wikipedia_en_medicine_maxi_2020-02.zim
  • Search for Hepatitis A and launch.

For comparison, search for the same page in wikipedia_en_all_novid_2018-06.zim or wikipedia_en_all_novid_2018-10.zim. At least in the former, there is no delay and no freeze.

Maybe we shouldn't care much about IE11 any more, but there are few options available for people with old machines now that the Desktop application is compiled only for 64 bit.

@kelson42
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@Jaifroid Not sure, this is still officially supported by Microsoft.

@Jaifroid
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@kelson42 IE11 is still "supported" in the sense that it is still packaged with Windows 10 mainly because businesses still use it for old software that has Active X proprietary technology. We took a decision to continue testing with IE11 because it is the only browser guaranteed to be available without further download in a Windows XP/Vista/7 machine, and those users (I guess mainly in Global South) have few options left for running Kiwix on 32-bit machines. But it's just a guess as to whether it's still worth supporting. It's not "too" hard to continue to do so, but I think once we achieve #554 (npm-webpack) it might be the time to drop it...

@Jaifroid
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This issue was fixed by #630.

@Jaifroid Jaifroid removed this from the v3.3 milestone Dec 6, 2020
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