It's difficult to be really objective about this. Part of my problem is having gone from dialup to Comcast broadband about six months ago. That was supposed to improve my speed by a factor of at least 20 or something, but it seemed more like 4.

There's great variability in how fast these pages load. I never sit here with a stopwatch, but oftentimes I'd say they load in two to three seconds; I like that. About 10 to 20 percent of the time it takes fifteen seconds or more, and when that happens I close out the site and do something else. The variation in speed might have to do with how many other people in the vicinity are using the service. I'm afraid that as more and more people use broadband, and use it intensively for video downloads, etc., the networks will be slowed. Then the ISP's will be promoting a new premium service for additional fees.

The ads/surveys/etc. have been tolerable over the past six months. The worst were those "video ads" that I couldn't get rid of, blocked all the site content, and would follow down the page with the scroll. When I got those, the only solution was to exit, cursing. And I don't see that triangular survey one anymore that would shoot in from the left.

I use firefox and I use my hosts file to block ad servers that firefox doesn't inherently block on it's own, so I've never seen any of the ads cacau lists nor the opinion survey window +oM speaks of. IMO firefox is by far and away the best web browser you can use, and is generally more secure than internet explorer. But I too have noticed gardenweb is quite slow loading up compared to earlier days. I think it's probably a consequence of more people using the website and gardenweb is in need of some more server bandwidth to keep up. Who knows if/when they'll upgrade and increase their bandwidth.

Here is a link that might be useful: You can download and try out firefox here if you want

What kman said.
Y'all need to ditch that crappy Internet Explorer and come on over to Firefox.
There was a mass exodus of folks from this site a few years back when iVillage bought it and the pop-ups increased exponentially - for folks who weren't using Firefox; we tried to tell those who complained about it to switch, but some of them just left and never came back. I'm still saddened over the loss of some of my long-time cyber-friends.

I haven't used IE in 5 or 6 years. I happen to have this site bookmarked on my embedded Safari Mac browser. Other times, I use Firefox. But, what I'm talking about is the extreme slowness of THIS site compared to other places I frequent.

+oM

I have IE and dialup. So slow I usually click on some topic and then do something else and come back later to see if it is loaded yet. Some topics with pictures take ten minutes or more.

Yes, things have been much slower recently, but in the last week it has gotten better again. I am very selective about what topics I open because it is so slow. I hate topics with vague titles, leaving me guessing if they would good for me to read.

--Spruce

I use Foxfire with adblock and a cable modem. The site is working great for me. No ads at all and as fast as ever.