I’m excited to announce the release of the initial version of a behind-the-scenes performance enhancement we’ve been working on for a while. This way it works is it pre-processes your pages on the server before they are loaded, so that when they are loaded they load a lot faster. In addition to laying the groundwork for further improvements (as Josh has mentioned in the monthly update), there are immediate performance improvements this unlocks. This includes stuff like:
Moving static styles for elements to a generated stylesheet
Reducing repeated calculations for elements which are in repeating groups
Having a faster rendering pipeline in general.
Note: These improvements do not apply to pages on the legacy responsive engine, sorry.
Since it’s a pretty large behind-the-scenes change, we’ve decided to launch it first on the experimental features panel. Please test it out in your pages before pushing anything to production.
Thanks for submitting your bug report - I took a look and it seems to be working now? I’ll do some more investigating / let success take a look as well, but I’ve tried upgrading multiple apps and none have had that issue. Please let me know if it persists!
Thank you @cal! I turned it on and am experiencing dropped fonts. When inspecting, I see some of the fonts get put to var, which picks up the default font. Is that a quick fix, or should I submit a bug report?
@cal This sounds great! Unfortunately I have not updated my apps to the new responsive engine because when I tried it, my apps got completely broken (+1000 issues on the issue checker) and the design got all flipped over as well. Fixing all that that is like having to rebuild years of work.
I think there is a lot of people in my same situation and we would appreciate if you could find a way that allow us to update to the new responsive engine without messing up our existing apps.
That way we can access to this kind of updates that are very important for all of us.
@mac2 If you wouldn’t mind submitting a bug report about the font issues, or DMing me an app / page to check, I would be grateful
@pachocastillosr Unfortunately, because the new engine and old engine are built on entirely different principles, it’s hard to make the change seamless. We are always looking into ways to make the upgrade experience smoother - a lot of people have had success with converting small sections of an app into reusable elements and converting those 1-by-1. Still, we understand it’s no easy feat.
Sam here from the success team - as @cal mentioned above this is a tedious process - if you want to DM me a link to your application I’m happy to take a look at it and help you develop a solid strategy for upgrading. It will take time, but it definitely shouldn’t take years!
@cal I realised when I upgraded that all my pop-ups were affected. All stopped scrolling, I had to add a group into the popup with scroll on overflow for it to display all content. Is this a feature or a bug? I understand that in the past a lot of developers have requested the page to stay static when popups were visible. Thanks
@rod.danan Thanks for the report - I should have a fix for that out shortly.
@amos - i’m not seeing that on my popups - is there a specific configuration of popups? Could you DM me a page / app to check? (it’s fine if you already disabled the feature, I can clone the app to test it out). Thanks!
I know it may be a silly question, but once we update our page to the new responsive engine, this enhancement will start to work, right? Or the page must be created from the scratch in the new engine?
I would love to get my grubby hands on this; see if I could come up with a framework to migrate them. You’re not the first one I see mentioning this pain. It pains me to see someone NOT using the new engine
@cal I see that this is starting to compile styles on the server and include DOM CSS Classes. Will this eventually lead to generating HTML on the server? I see that the page structure. is still loaded as an empty < body >.
