JetBlue a good and bad website

It started with this letter of apology on the corporate site of jetblue.com which was quite impressive. Discarding the content I liked the design and the simplicity of the navigation.

I then tried the flight booking interface and was even more impressed. It was intelligent and fast and since I was just goofing about to test rather than to book I accidently selected 30th of February as my return date and a Javascript alert box popped up and prompted me of a my misstake and corrected it. All very impressive since so many airline booking forms suck badly these days.

Then I clicked to go to the homepage and noticed how my Firefox almost froze and started stuttering. Even though the homepage fits on one screen and hasn't got much information it took 11 seconds to download it completely! (apple.com takes 4 seconds, peterbe.com takes 2 seconds on this WiFi connection I'm at)

Here's the explaination why:

Documents (2 files)    30 kb
Images (54 files)      114 kb
Style Sheets (5 files) 25 kb
Scripts (17 files)     165 kb
Total (78 files)       333 kb

For that little page it takes 78 requests to be sent to get the whole thing. I don't care how fast those individual requests are because it's the total that counts. And unless you're on a supercomputer you'll definitely feel how slowly your web browser is piecing together those 54 images that it needs to download.

Shame on you JetBlue! Such promising site apart from the homepage. For God's sake, the calendar Javascript weights 40Kb which is twice the weight of my favorite whole Javascript framework jQuery.