Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Creating a Great User Interface For Your Web App
Friday, October 29, 2010
Today we are kicking off a series of blog posts that provide tips and tricks on how to create better web apps as well as insights behind the technology of the Chrome Web Store - Ed
.
Looking at building a web app for the
Chrome Web Store
? The browser landscape has changed a lot recently and user expectations about the quality and polish level of apps are extremely high thanks in part to the success of highly polished mobile apps. Can you meet these high expectations with a webapp?
Fortunately, you now have a lot more power and flexibility with the user interface thanks to the power of
HTML5, CSS3, and other new web technologies
. It’s now possible to make a web app that is every bit as slick and polished as the best desktop or phone app, while still maintaining the flexibility and portability of the web. For example, using CSS3 transitions and animations, you can make actions in your app feel much more interactive. You can use CSS3’s support for gradients, reflections and rounded corners to create scalable interfaces that look as if they were built using hand-crafted images. And with the rise of
GPU-accelerated graphics
, you’re now able to create compelling 3D experiences.
However, creating great user experiences is about more than sizzle and polish. Another important factor is focus. Ideally, an app should accomplish a single task well with a minimal amount of distractions. Be judicious with your use of links and ads that could take users away from the task at hand. When the user launches your app, they’re trying to accomplish something specific that your app enables; help them get started right away by minimizing the steps that they need to take, especially when they’re first trying your app. If the first thing a user sees is a registration screen, many will bounce off (once you need the users to sign in, you can use
OpenID and Google Accounts
to simplify the process). By installing your app they’ve indicated something stronger than just clicking a link - they want to use your app to accomplish something specific. Keep the distractions to a minimum and keep your app focused on the job at hand and your users will be happier.
UI responsiveness in your app is also crucial. For example, let’s say you’ve built a photo stitching app that glues together photos into one seamless larger photo. This may require a lot of CPU horsepower or even that you do the heavy lifting on the server. Maybe the whole operation takes two minutes to complete. However, you can still keep your interactive performance high while the operation proceeds asynchronously. You could ship the CPU work off of the main user interface thread using an
HTML5 Worker
or you could offload it to a server with an XHR. That alone isn’t enough though. You need to give the user feedback while this is happening, ideally something cool and visual and not just a progress bar. Meanwhile, the user should be able to do other things. If that’s not possible, then cancelling needs to be easy and responsive. Interactive performance is usually something that needs to be designed into your app up front rather than added later as an afterthought, so plan ahead.
In short, you need to think both like app developer as well as a web developer. Putting a little extra thought into focus, performance, feedback and polish can make the difference between “meh” and “whee!”.
Posted by Erik Kay, Software Engineer
V8 Benchmark Suite Updated
Thursday, October 7, 2010
The
V8 benchmark suite
contains a number of pure JavaScript benchmarks that capture the areas in which a JavaScript engine has to perform well to support the well-structured, maintainable, and high-performance web applications of tomorrow. These benchmarks have been useful for us when optimizing the V8 JavaScript engine and we have found that making them run faster leads to better performance for many of the web applications we enjoy using every day.
Today we have released
version 6
of the V8 benchmark suite. The main changes are in the RegExp and Splay components of the benchmark suite. For reference, we describe each of the existing benchmarks in the suite below, along with any changes made in version 6.
RegExp
: Regular expression benchmark generated by extracting regular expression operations from 50 of the most popular web pages. The regular expressions are exercised a number of times to reflect their popularity on those top 50 web pages.
Changed in version 6: each regular expression is now exercised on a number of different input strings instead of just one.
Splay
: Data manipulation benchmark that modifies a large splay tree to exercise the automatic memory management subsystem. The benchmark builds a large splay tree in a setup phase and then measures how fast nodes can be added and removed.
Changed in version 6: no longer converts the same numeric key to string repeatedly and updates the splay tree in a way that increases the pressure on the memory management subsystem.
Richards
: Operating system kernel simulation benchmark originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards. The Richards benchmark effectively measures how fast the JavaScript engine is at accessing object properties, calling functions, and dealing with polymorphism. It is a standard benchmark that has been successfully used to measure the performance of many modern programming language implementations.
DeltaBlue
: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko. The DeltaBlue benchmark is written in an object-oriented style with a multi-level class hierarchy. As such it measures how fast the JavaScript engine is at running well-structured applications with many objects and small functions.
Changed in version 6: fixed a couple of typos that do not have any impact on the behavior of the benchmark.
Crypto
: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu. The benchmark encrypts an input string, decrypts the result and verifies that encryption followed by decryption yields the original input. The encryption/decryption algorithm is RSA and the benchmark measures the performance of arithmetic operations on integers and array access.
RayTrace
: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister. The benchmark measures floating-point computations where the object structure is constructed using the Prototype JavaScript library.
Changed in version 6: removed dead code that has no impact on the behavior of the benchmark.
EarleyBoyer
: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler. The benchmarks exercise important areas of the JavaScript engine such as object allocation, data structure manipulation, and garbage collection. The translated nature of the benchmarks make them appear foreign, but the runtime characteristics of the benchmarks are highly representative of many real world web applications.
Curious to know how your browser performs?
Give it a spin
on the new version of the V8 benchmark suite.
Posted by Kasper Lund, Software Engineer
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