Quiet on the blog is often good news: it means that web site improvements are in thw works. Today we've rolled out some nice speedups of the rankings site.

One of the hazards of working with great hardware and software when developing a site is that it's easy to forget that there are lots of people running old browsers on old machines. The rankings code we initially launched is very Javascript intensive. That's fine for modern browsers, but not so much for Internet Explorer, particularly IE 6 and 7. And about 10% of our visitors run IE 6 or 7 (Come on, people - IE 6 was released 9 years ago! It's time to upgrade!). I've been making some big optimizations to the code, and the JavaScript now runs much, much faster on IE. Enjoy!

If you're stuck with IE but want to experience the site properly as it was meant to be seen, try downloading Chrome Frame, an IE plugin written by Google that lets you render web pages using the much faster Chrome engine.