Managing Your Virtual Machines in VirtualBox

As developer testing your software on different system configurations and versions of operating systems is a good way to improve quality of your application. But how would you do it?

Installing multiple operating systems on your computer might solve the issue but you won’t like it. It will cut your hard drive into multiple partitions and eat free space from the partition used by your primary system. Also managing such setup is not easy. Easy OS will update differently. You will need to install required applications as many times as many operating systems you will install.

In addition this will become more difficult if your software depends on another product. Which of course has also different versions and does not offer portable deployment. What than?

Fortunately Virtual Machines has been invented. However managing them in efficient way might be very tricky.

This article will describe my current setup of virtual machines in VirtualBox and best practices which I have came with. 

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Loading external JavaScript synchronously might block your page to load

A few days ago I wanted to visit zen pencils webpage. You may find some inspirational quotes wrapped in pretty cartoon art. I enjoy them both. However when I opened the link in my browser it all got stuck with header shown and nothing more loading.

Page stopped loading because my browser (Opera if you do not recognize) was waiting for some external resource to load.

Fortunately I know how to overcome this issue and easily disabled scripts on this particular page. After hitting F5 the page got loaded instantly. But I’m a pro-user and I don’t think common user could figure it out. They would just simply close the tab (perhaps entire browser), got a bit angry because they didn’t see what they wanted and leave.

While nowadays keeping page load times low is very important you surely don’t want this to happen on your site.

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DOM in $(document).ready not always ready

Today I have found out that Internet Explorer 9 might fire document ready JavaScript event before document is actually ready. It took me a few swearwords to figure it out. I experienced this issue using Internet Explorer 9 and jQuery 1.8.0.

The solution is simple – in case you are using inline scripts, just put them at the bottom of your page. That’s it.

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