Favorites Manager/Sidebar Unusable in 4.9.x


Secret-HQ

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Bookmarking sites may have fallen out of favor, but I still do quite a bit of it, and the Favorites Sidebar and Favorites Manager in 4.9.0.2200 and 4.9.0.2400 are quite buggy.  I've mentioned this elsewhere, but as it doesn't have its own topic, I thought I'd start one.

  • Sort by Frequency and Sort by Title don't work at all in the Favorites Sidebar.  (They do still work in Favorites Manager.)
  • The Favorites Sidebar takes a long time to load, as does the Favorites Manager, compared to 4.4.8 and earlier versions.  I'm guessing the new engine/core is slower to render lists of Favorites.
  • The Favorites Sidebar, in particular, is excruciatingly slow to load and to update.  I have a lot of Favorites in my main profile (around 6,000), but it now takes three to five minutes (!) for the sidebar to load, which is too long for it to be useful.  If I restore or perform a fresh install, it can take up to 10 minutes (!!) for the Favorites Sidebar to load on first use.
  • The History Manager, by contrast, is still as snappy as it's ever been.  While my Favorite.dat file is 4 MB, my History_Part_1.dat (of 32) is 65 MB.  (Each of the 31 other History*.dat files are around 3 MB each.)

Admittedly, I have a larger than average number of Favorites — but it's troubling not to be able to navigate them.

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1 hour ago, Secret-HQ said:

Bookmarking sites may have fallen out of favor, but I still do quite a bit of it, and the Favorites Sidebar and Favorites Manager in 4.9.0.2200 and 4.9.0.2400 are quite buggy.  I've mentioned this elsewhere, but as it doesn't have its own topic, I thought I'd start one.

  • Sort by Frequency and Sort by Title don't work at all in the Favorites Sidebar.  (They do still work in Favorites Manager.)
  • The Favorites Sidebar takes a long time to load, as does the Favorites Manager, compared to 4.4.8 and earlier versions.  I'm guessing the new engine/core is slower to render lists of Favorites.
  • The Favorites Sidebar, in particular, is excruciatingly slow to load and to update.  I have a lot of Favorites in my main profile (around 6,000), but it now takes three to five minutes (!) for the sidebar to load, which is too long for it to be useful.  If I restore or perform a fresh install, it can take up to 10 minutes (!!) for the Favorites Sidebar to load on first use.
  • The History Manager, by contrast, is still as snappy as it's ever been.  While my Favorite.dat file is 4 MB, my History_Part_1.dat (of 32) is 65 MB.  (Each of the 31 other History*.dat files are around 3 MB each.)

Admittedly, I have a larger than average number of Favorites — but it's troubling not to be able to navigate them.

This has been addressed in the internal version 2500.  Sidebar favoites seems to have improved by about a factor of 2 or better.  However, that may not be enough for the massive favorites list you describe.  Mine is probably less than 200 or so.

However, there is another problem which has not been fixed in the Sidebar Favorites, the Additional Functions drop-down has no entries.

See this:

 SidebarFavDrop-down_error.thumb.png.5b8b

                                           <<SL>>

 

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31 minutes ago, SnowLeopard said:

This has been addressed in the internal version 2500.  Sidebar favoites seems to have improved by about a factor of 2 or better.  However, that may not be enough for the massive favorites list you describe.  Mine is probably less than 200 or so.

Great news!

At least, I hope it's good news for me.  This is the first bug I've encountered in a long time that could be a possible deal-breaker for me using Maxthon day to day.  :huh:

At first, I thought I might be able to speed things up by disabling Favorites sync, but it takes just as long to fire up the Favorites Sidebar with it off as it does with it on.

31 minutes ago, SnowLeopard said:

However, there is another problem which has not been fixed in the Sidebar Favorites, the Additional Functions drop-down has no entries.

For what it's worth, I haven't seen that in .2200 or .2400.  The three-button menu is still working fine for me at the moment.

Maxthon_4.9.0.2400_FavoritesSidebarMenu.png

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17 minutes ago, Secret-HQ said:

Great news!

At least, I hope it's good news for me.  This is the first bug I've encountered in a long time that could be a possible deal-breaker for me using Maxthon day to day.  :huh:

At first, I thought I might be able to speed things up by disabling Favorites sync, but it takes just as long to fire up the Favorites Sidebar with it off as it does with it on.

For what it's worth, I haven't seen that in .2200 or .2400.  The three-button menu is still working fine for me at the moment.

Maxthon_4.9.0.2400_FavoritesSidebarMenu.png

That's right, I checked 2300 and 2400 neither of which had any problem.  I'm surprised something fell through the cracks.

                               <<SL>>

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Sorry for double posting. Same here sometimes it loads the favorites (but slowly) sometimes it doesn't load at all. If it does load after a wait the next time you open it after closing it is at the normal fast speed. The small yellow star icon at the left of the favorite bar works perfectly and very fast. So does the main Favorites manager page in the menu.

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8 hours ago, Magdalene said:

Sorry for double posting. Same here sometimes it loads the favorites (but slowly) sometimes it doesn't load at all. If it does load after a wait the next time you open it after closing it is at the normal fast speed. The small yellow star icon at the left of the favorite bar works perfectly and very fast. So does the main Favorites manager page in the menu.

Hi,

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The problem with loading speed for favorites and Skynote...is being looked into. We hope to see this functionality improved in future versions.

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9 minutes ago, BugSir007 said:

Hi,

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The problem with loading speed for favorites and Skynote...is being looked into. We hope to see this functionality improved in future versions.

Opening Skynote the first time on a clean install of 4.9.0.2500 froze my machine completely, that doesn't happen often on this machine, had to ctrl+alt +delete!

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I haven't experienced the SkyNote slowdown — but I only keep a few KBs of data in SkyNote, whereas my Favorites.dat is up to 4 MB.  (I do remember SkyNote being a little hinky when I first installed .2200, though:  It had been reset to "always on top," which I don't normally use, and I lost the last line of a note I'd added just before performing the upgrade.)

I don't know whether this is a helpful suggestion or not, @BugSir007, but if the Blink core is struggling with Favorites and SkyNote, maybe Trident would fare better?

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23 minutes ago, Secret-HQ said:

I haven't experienced the SkyNote slowdown — but I only keep a few KBs of data in SkyNote, whereas my Favorites.dat is up to 4 MB.  (I do remember SkyNote being a little hinky when I first installed .2200, though:  It had been reset to "always on top," which I don't normally use, and I lost the last line of a note I'd added just before performing the upgrade.)

I don't know whether this is a helpful suggestion or not, @BugSir007, but if the Blink core is struggling with Favorites and SkyNote, maybe Trident would fare better?

Thanks for more details,

We are checking on this problem now, i can still occasionally encounter the problem with favorites extension functionality.

I'll pass your suggestion to our team to see what can be done.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm not seeing much improvement in performance in version 4.9.0.2600.  Initial loading of the sidebar seems to have dropped from three to five minutes to a solid one to two minutes, but that's still too slow to make use of it.

Admittedly, my Favorites file is larger than most users' in this day and age — but I can think of no reason it should take a prohibitively long time to render.  The main browser window can parse far larger, longer, and more complex .HTML files than a simple list of bookmarks in the blink of the an eye.  Is it unreasonable to expect an XML file with a thousand or two entries would take minutes' worth of processing time to render?

The history list, by contrast, remains as snappy as it's ever been.

Also, the sort by title and sort by frequency context-menu items in the sidebar are still not working.  I mentioned that in my original post, but since I didn't create a separate thread and I haven't seen anyone else mention it, that may not have gotten onto the bug list.  (Would you mind double-checking, @BugSir007?  I edited the original post to draw a little more attention to it so it doesn't get lost in my general grousing about speed.  :devil:  )

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Glad to see sidebar sorting is on the roadmap of issues to address.

I remain concerned about the lag in rendering the sidebar and using the Favorites Manager, though.  Nice to see QuickAccess recover (some) of its snappiness in .2700, but the Favorites are such a slog that I'm becoming concerned about whether this issue may eventually drive me to using another browser (nooooooo!!!).

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