I’ve just merged another client side performance improvement for Discourse. Our site header has been re-written using the widget code that gave us a huge performance increase within topics.
The site header is present on every page and our benchmarks showed that it often took up 1/4 of the initial rendering time of a Discourse page. With the new code, it renders roughly 8x faster than before, which should be a significant improvement on android devices.
Since this is a major re-write, the odds of it including regressions are quite high, so I’d like to warn everyone now that if you are following the tests-passed branch of Discourse you might want to wait a few days before updating unless you are comfortable helping us track down bugs.
In the meantime, please use this topic to report any issues you encounter and I’ll be fixing them as quickly as I can.
Fixes
- Navigating directly between topics wasn’t updating the title of the topic
- Clicking categories was not closing the menu
- Cmd / Shift clicking links didn’t open them in new tabs
- Topic status icons were missing in topics
- HTML entities were missing from titles
- Weird resizing of home logo
- Right clicking on the logo in Firefox was broken
- Middle clicking on user notifications was broken
- Missing
alttag on user notifications - Akismet link was missing
- Widget setting for custom home logo urls
- Similar topics stopped displaying
- Search menu would lose the context
- Header positioned oddly in Safari
- Middle clicking search should open it in a new tab