Friday, August 31, 2007

RadEditor "Prometheus" up to 76% faster

[Cross posted from Telerik.com blogs]

For months now we have been talking about the new RadEditor being built in the "Prometheus" suite and how it is going to be the best version of RadEditor to date. Today an early preview of that work was released in the "Prometheus" Futures build and made available for general testing in the Telerik community. Obviously, the version that was released today looks a lot different from the final version that will be released- dialogs are still rough, features are unpolished, and some features are missing- but it is still a great look at what's coming.

Today I ran the RadEditor Futures release build through some tests to compare the total page load time to the current Q2 2007 SP2 RadEditor. While the exact feature sets of the two controls differ at this stage, I tried to configure the classic Editor with the only the controls in the default "Prometheus" Editor to make the tests fair. To measure the page load times, I turned to the handy JavaScript page load stop watch I blogged about many months ago. I ran each control- Classic and Prometheus- through 12 tests: 6 in FireFox 2, 6 in IE7, 3 with "unprimed" browser cache, and 3 with the component's files already cached by the browser.

The results were amazing!



RadEditor "Prometheus" on average loaded 76% faster in IE7 after the control's files had already been cached. It loaded 67% faster on an unprimed cache. The gains in FireFox are more modest, but the load time has still been cut almost in half. Overall, IE7 loads both versions of RadEditor faster than FF2, but the difference in performance is much greater with RadEditor "Prometheus". IE7 on average loads RadEditor "Prometheus" 56% faster than FireFox, compared to a mere 13% advantage with the classic Editor component. I expect FireFox's performance to approach IE's in future RadEditor "Prometheus" builds.

Out of curiosity, I compared "Prometheus" Futures RadEditor to another leading WYSIWYG web editor to see how their performance compared. The other editor loaded quickly- faster in some tests by tenths of a second. At first I was a little stunned. Then I compared more closely the feature set and richness of this competing control. It completely lacked innovative user interface features like the integrated RadWindow for dialogs (it just uses clunky browser windows) and basic features like undo history (not to mention lack of Ajax support or an extensive client-side API)! When you consider the extra features and richness RadEditor "Prometheus" delivers in 3 tenths of a second, I think the delay becomes acceptable for most users.

Either way, the number one rich-text editor on the web is definitely getting faster in version 8 and any applications that use RadEditor should definitely plan of upgrading soon after Q2!

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