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Published on Jul 15, 2020

Oxygen Builder Load Time – Browser Tests

Sridhar Katakam

If you have been building sites with Oxygen for a while now you would know that one of the points in the “Needs improvement” list is the load time of Oxygen editor.

From my experience and tests the average time it takes for Oxygen editor to load is 15s for most (since Chrome is the most popular browser) users. Note that we are talking about the time taken for Oxygen editor or builder to load in the WP admin, not the loading time of pages built with Oxygen on the front end.

But did you know that by simply changing your browser (at least when working with Oxygen) you can shave off about 50% of that time?

Earlier today Supa Mike sent me the full backup of a site he is working on (thanks Mike). I restored it on my localhost (powered by Local) and tested various browsers to see which one loads Oxygen editor the quickest.

For each test, I recorded my screen using ScreenFlow and measured the time it took from the moment I clicked on Edit with Oxygen link for the Page set as front page on the Pages list screen to the moment the Structure panel appeared with the icons (the site uses Hydrogen Pack which adds useful icons depending on the type of component).

Each browser has been tested in its respective incognito/private mode i.e., without any extensions enabled.

The 2nd and 3rd runs were from the same browser session to simulate how we typically work so that the browser caching factor gets included in the tests.

Here are the results.

Note: Tested on a Mac.

Despite being a Mac user and it being the fastest to load Oxygen, I do not use Safari (currently). I find its feature set and the extension ecosystem limiting compared to other browsers like Chrome and Firefox. This makes Firefox Developer Edition my preferred browser of choice when developing sites using Oxygen.

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