Recently we made an investment to improve the performance of our intranet. We made many changes in different layers: SQL, Network, Browser upgrade and code. Here I want to tell about what code changes we did to improve the web browser performance. Please leave feedback if you find it useful. You can also share your suggestions. We measured the performance before our code changes and after them. We had amazing results. Unfortunately I can not share any numbers, but we improved the Time to First Byte, time to load event firing in the browser, memory consumption in the clients and, perhaps, the most important, we improved the perceived performance of the Intranet, the way how users experience the speed and UI responsiveness. To do this I got many ideas of my project colleagues and branch colleagues. Here is the list of changes we’ve implemented:

In our project we still have to support Internet Explorer 8. The CSS issues in IE8 are most difficult to debug and solve. You can not add a new rule in Developer Tools or toggle the state of an element to hover as in moder web browser dev tools. One solution that I’ve come up to today, is to add a style with javascript or jQuery, open the script pane in IE8 Dev Tools and add this line:

I am reading Mobile HTML5 written by Estelle Weyle. It is an awesome recap and new knowledge about html, css and javascript. I want to highlight one of tips I got: Use the weakest CSS selectors (can be found on page 204). We all know, that inline CSS and !important are evil. They have a higher level of specifity and override the standard cascade of the CSS rules. If you use !important, then it will be hard to override CSS rules when you really need it. After these two classic “evils” the evil number three is overqualifying of CSS selectors. You should really never add more classes or ids or elements than needed. Consider this:

I have been curious about the responsive design but have not had time to try it out. To learn more I decided to make an existing website more responsive. A friend of mine drives a Chuvash Dictionary website: samah.chv.su. Today it looks like this in a mobile browser:

The site is a classic 1000px-ish centered page with header and two columns. The left column is for the main content and the right column for additional “aside” information. Can it be more classic? This current version works, you can still use the dictionary on a mobile phone. But there are several improvements that can be done:

Today I want to share little css tip for styling the suiteBar in SharePoint 2013 and making it work even in IE8. I needed to apply a green color to the suiteBar (#005128). It worked in all browsers except IE8:

The reason why is a special css rule (in corev15.css) that only IE8 understands:

.ms-core-needIEFilter #suiteBarLeft {
  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(GradientType=0,
    startColorstr=#ff0072c6,endColorstr=#ff0072c6);
}

I found this answer in an blog post written by Trace Armstrong: SharePoint 2013 – Branding the Top Bar and the Importance of Browser Testing. You could override this css rule with your colors, just dig into the msdn documentation. What I needed though, was just a plain color, so I didn’t want to dig into that old progid-definitions. There is actually a simpler solution on social.msdn.microsoft.com. A guy called avshinnikov just overrides the “filter” rule by setting it to none. If you apply it only with id selector (#suiteBarLeft) then you have to put “!important” after that. Fortunately I allready had my own css class on html tag which is a sort of a “namespace” for my selectors:

by Chris Love [slideshare id=15218139&doc=webperformanceoptimizationformodernwebapplications-121116224847-phpapp01]

If you develop much javascript and css, this is the exension to Visual Studio you just can’t live without: Web Essentials (It is even released for VS2012). You can do many things with it. Here are two examples for simple but very useful functions: 1. Show which browsers support a css attribute: 2. Collapse javascript functions and create #region areas like in C# code: There is much more, like less and coffeescript parsing. Just check the documentation. And it is fully appliable in SharePoint development.

Wouldn’t it be nice to use html5 and css3 in SharePoint? No problems, there is actually v5 master out there, created by Kyle Schaefer. Or just use h5ml5 and css3 right away in your webparts and pages. But there is a big problem. It doesn’t work in IE9–. One of the issues (even listed by Kyle) is that “save” doesn’t work in modal dialogs where Rich Text Editor is used. Especialy it is for modal dialogs. The problem is not IE9, neither html5 and css3. After some digging in javascript code which is shipped with SharePoint I found out that the problem is some legacy javascript code which is not supported by IE9 but in IE8– (and compatibility mode). When we set IE9 mode in IE9 Dev Tools (F12) and go to Tasks list and try to create a task, we’ll get an error: It is RTE_GetEditorIFrame from init.js:

Today Erik Swensson’s book Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization came to our company. I am looking forward to read it. It’s about time to see alternatives to Randy’s starters.

Well, input and IE aren’t friends, are they? I found a solution: not defining input height. The only shortcoming of this solution is…, well the solution itself, sometimes you need to define the input height. However, don’t set height, just define, font-size for text inside and padding, and it will be aligned:

input {
  font-size:20pt;
  padding: 10px;
}

Do you know some better ways to do it, Tell me.