Ask HN: Why is the Khanacademy website so power-hungry?

9 points by joshuapants 10y ago ↗ HN

I like to brush up on some topics using Khanacademy, because it is well structured and gives quizzes with feedback. One thing I've noticed, however, is that my laptop gets very hot, the fan spins up, scrolling gets laggy, and Javascript elements (quizzes, etc) have enormous latency.

What are they doing in there that causes it to consume so much computing power? I feel bad for anyone who uses the site and isn't fortunate enough to have a powerful computer like I do, because if it's annoying to me it must ruin the experience for them.

4 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 17.8 ms ] thread

flippant 10y ago ↗

I think you might be using flash to play the videos. I've used the site on a 5yr old macbook with Chrome and haven't noticed issues.

joshuapants 10y ago ↗

I don't have Flash installed so it can't be that. Hm, maybe a browser issue.

Mettalknight 10y ago ↗

If you have chrome can you open up its task manager and print screen it?

kluck 10y ago ↗

I recognize this effect with a lot of websites, namely google maps, most fancy/designed web 2.0 startup websites (those that like to display a lot layers using CSS that change their position when scrolling... don't know how this is called)

My guess would be inappropriate or too much JavaScript or other stuff that blocks execution of JavaScript, maybe some kind of plugin that is beeing initialized.