Is there a way to know anything about hardware resources of 'platform' accessing webpage?

Question

I\'d like to be able to find out about a browser\'s hardware resources from a web page, or at least a rough estimation.

Even when you detect the presence of modern t

Answer 1

While Nickolay gave a very good and extensive explanation, I'd like to suggest one very simple, but possibly effective solution - you could try measuring how long it took for the page to load and decide whether to go with the resource-hungry features or not (Gmail does something similar - if the loading goes on for too long, a suggestion to switch to the "basic HTML" version will show up).

The idea is that, for slow computers, loading any page, regardless of content, should be, on average, much slower than on modern computers. Getting the amount of time it took to load your page should be simple, but there are a couple of things to note:

• You need to experiment a bit to determine where to put the "too slow" threshold.
• You need to keep in mind that slow connections can cause the page to load slower, but this will probably make a difference in a very small number of cases (using DOM ready instead of the load event can also help here).
• In addition, the first time a user loads your site will probably be much slower, due to caching. One simple solution for this is to keep your result in a cookie or local storage and only take loading time into account when the user visits for the first time.
• Don't forget to always, no matter what detection mechanism you used and how accurate it is, allow the user to choose between the regular, resource-hungry and the faster, "uglier" version - some people prefer better looking effects even if it means the website will be slower, while other value speed and snappiness more.