May 10th site update

Hi there,

This week’s release includes a big update to our image viewer. You can now browse through image galleries without having to reload the page. This includes a lot of exciting new tech stuff behind the scenes, and it lays some important foundations going forward. But in reality it means your pages will be faster, and you can flick through all those lovely Benga images with ease. Since we want to roll it out slowly the image reloading is only enabled in the UK and for worldwide subscribers, but everyone should see some speed improvements.

You’ll need a modern browser to take advantage of this. That means something like Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or probably your smartphone too. Our stats tell us most of you are already using one of these.

We also fixed some problems with our Music Manager, so if you had problems uploading your music it should now be fixed.

That’s it for now. Have fun and enjoy some nice music!

Edit: Sorry, it seems that this update has caused some problems *sigh*, so we had to roll it back. We will let you know when we fixed this problem.

Edit: We found the problem and re-deployed the release. Sorry about that.

Now it just replaces the image with the next one, previously it reloaded the entire page.

If you have NoScript (or any similar script-blocking browser extension) you'll have to allow scripts for it to work (disabling scripts from last.fm and googleapis.com seemed to break it and cause it to fall back to the old way)

I was wondering about this, too... ;-) Time for checking Firefox then, as it will take Opera at least a few more weeks to come up with a stable v12 including full hardware acceleration etc.

[Edit]
OK, with Firefox 12 I can see the spinning circle within the image space while loading the next picture, but I'm not sure if it is really faster than loading a new page in Opera 11.64. Furthermore it does not seem to load all pictures, e.g. this one from the Gustav Mahler profile does not work:

http://www.last.fm/music/Gustav+Mahler/+images/190334

The preview of that image works though. Oops, same error (and spinning circle) in Opera 11.64.

Right, must have been in a cache for thumbnails and/or previews then, because I could still see it on the overview page. Anyhow, now it's gone for good.

Talking about browser page loading times I've found an interesting review on Tom's Hardware where they tested current browsers this April on an old Windows XP machine (like mine):

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-xp-web-browser-performance,3167-6.html

It shows that Opera 11.62 is the fastest when opening an uncached page (like the next picture in an artist gallery).

A small white frame highlighting the currently viewed picture would be great :)

Thanks for the update.

Stable Opera v12 was released yesterday, and it does load the next image in an artist gallery faster with the CORS method now. It also seems to be a bit faster with general page loads, at least on my old IBM Thinkpad.

The full hardware acceleration is still considered to be experimental though and therefore disabled on default.