Placebo

Over the weekend I read an article on digg about a way to speed up Safari by removing an initial page loading delay. It reminded me about an article Dave Hyatt – one of the developers of Safari – wrote about the FOUC problem last September. In this article he explains why browsers sometimes need to delay the rendering of the page because of the interaction between the loading of external css stylesheets and scripts accessing the not yet completely loaded DOM. Today Dave responds to the article on digg. The funniest thing I’ve read in a while.

Some of the initial reactions of the digg crowd:

wow..this really did work for me..i mean..the only useful otion (there is a handful of diff options) i used was turning off the delay to open pages. AND IT WORKED! my safari does seem a bit quicker..

Yep, page loading delay is absurd to say the least, that shoud be disabled by default.

Ya, this software saved Safari for me, I was using firefox for a while on my mac, but I found this little hack and started using Safari again simply becuase the pages load so damn fast now. It is definately a noticable difference.

Made a HUGE difference for me! Safari is usable now!

And the reaction of Dave Hyatt:

This just goes to prove how inaccurate people’s powers of perception are when it comes to measuring the performance of browsers. I say this because the preference in question is dead and does absolutely nothing in Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0.

Never underestimate the power of the placebo effect :)