Weird occurrence with Firefox

  • Resolved AWOL

    (@awol)


    1 day, 6 hours ago

    I don’t quite know how to explain this, and I don’t know but really doubt it is a Blocksy problem, but please bear with me. I have been trying to improve the load times of my site, and while doing so I happened to notice something very odd. I was repeatedly reloading one page after making adjustments and checking the Network tab of the console, specifically the Finish time of the load, in both Firefox and Google Chrome, both the latest versions. I thought the load had finished, because the timing had stopped changing, the reload button was visible (as opposed to the ‘X’ to stop the load), and nothing further was appearing in the list of requests. However I moved my mouse from the console area onto the site and all of a sudden the time changed and four new requests appeared, although nothing changed on screen. The time literally jumps, from whatever it is on, to a new higher time instantly, and this can be anything from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on when the mouse is moved. This does not happen in Chrome though. I have tinkered with numerous things (with the help of Grok), such as checking Litespeed Cache settings, deactivating and reactivating plugins, and even adding php code to my child theme functions file (Grok suggested about 10 different bits of code to change when these files were being called), but none of it has stopped the behaviour. The four requests in question that appear are all for Blocksy assets, three js files and a stylesheet, as follows:
    wp-content/themes/blocksy/static/bundle/418.66ea70734eb9e0d6ad3f.js
    wp-content/themes/blocksy/static/bundle/95.9b58e560812076065644.js
    wp-content/themes/blocksy/static/bundle/815.e63c92833a5f3723714e.js
    wp-content/themes/blocksy/static/bundle/non-critical-styles.min.css

    The even stranger thing is that this similar behaviour is also occurring (but generating different requests, and a lot more of them) when I hover the mouse over the Gtranslate language switcher, with all the requests being for files related to that plugin, mostly country flag images.

    I have looked at my Firefox settings but nothing jumps out at me there, and unfortunately because of the nature of the occurrence I don’t know when it started happening, so I can’t tie it to anything like an update to something, either plugin, theme or browser. I should mention that I use an iMac, and unfortunately have no other computer to test with. I have also tested with Safari (no problem) and Opera, which is doing the same thing – I don’t know if Firefox and Opera share a similar architecture? I haven’t tested on any other desktop browsers, but I have with an Android phone plugged into my computer and looked at it while using Microsoft Edge in Chrome developer tools, and this too is exhibiting the same behaviour. All of this tells me that either all these browsers are similar, or that it is not a browser issue.

    This seems like some kind of deferred or delayed behaviour that might even be intentional (and maybe Chrome masks this somehow?), but it makes assessing and improving the speed of my site a bit tricky – especially as what seems to be happening is that the clock keeps invisibly ticking until the mouse behaviour is detected, so I have had load times in the several minutes even though visually the site has successfully loaded – if I go for a break without having moved the mouse over the screen the time keeps racking up! Clearly this is something that needs fixing, but Grok and I have not been able to fathom it out, and I haven’t been able to find anything on the internet even similar to this behaviour. I am hoping you guys will have more insight than Grok.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hello @awol

    Actually, everything is correct here. Many web applications (including Blocksy) have implemented delayed loading for their script files, that are not necessarily needed immediately after loading the page.

    In this case, the scripts wait for an action to be taken for them to be loaded. And for desktop devices, in 99.9% of cases, the first action is mouse movement, since we can easily detect hover intents on desktop devices. On mobiles, it is usually the first tap on the screen after loading the page.

    This is standard practice and does not reference anything bad or malicious. There is nothing to “fix” here as everything behaves as expected.

    Unfortunately, I will not be able to comment on why this happens only on some specific browsers, as there isn’t really a way to change this mechanism based on just the browser. You may want to look at your configuration and start with fresh profiles, to truly compare multiple browsers. Of course, these tests must be done with all caching/optimisation turned off, as such solutions usually override what the developers have initially intended.

    Hope this clears things up.

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter AWOL

    (@awol)

    OK thanks @cteduard , I did wonder if this was the case. Is it possible that this could become optional (perhaps with a setting in Customizer?) in a future release? It is a pain having to avoid mousing over the site when trying to assess load speeds. Or is there a bit of code I could use to turn this off when testing?

    Hello @awol

    I’m afraid that this cannot be disabled, as it is part of the core theme software. Even WordPress itself has some assets delayed like this.

    Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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