Too Much Ajax Can Choke Your Site

Recently, I logged on to one of my oldest Hotmail email accounts with the intention of deleting it and moving on as I was in the final stages of my divorce from Microsoft’s hotmail accounts. So after I logged in and clicked ‘View My Account‘ to see where to click a link to close the account, I was taken to this page, that was loaded with about 5 separate AJAX update panels !

Hotmail User Account Page Stuffed with AJAX Update Panels

So I waited and waited for almost 20 times the average internet user’s attention span and still nothing happened. The loading… message and the rotating icon remained.

Since it takes more clicks and navigation to disable Javascript on IE and being a developer I want to click as little as possible, I logged on to the site using Firefox. For some reason, the AJAX did not function as expected on Firefox, which was a good thing for what I intended to do, and so I was able to see the Accounts page in Firefox without the “loading” script running eternally.

Ultimately I was able to work around the AJAX and do what I wanted to do, which is delete my account, but imagine if the user was a normal internet user and not a developer like me ?

9 out of 10 times, such excessive use of AJAX to ‘enrich the User Experience‘ is both un-necessary as well as dangerous. Un-necessary in this case because the Account Settings page is not a page that updates by the minute and hence does not require update sections in AJAX. Dangerous because if you frustrate your users enough with such “features” and prevent them from using the site the way they want to use it, your users are very likely to abandon you soon and never return to your site ever again.

Further Reading

• Alex Bosworth -On Ajax Mistakes
• Ajax and XML: Five Ajax anti-patterns
• CodeProject.com – IE will be stuck when requests too much? Fake the XHR !