I've not had much luck with efforts to add some commonly seen widgets to the forums here. The first was the Digg This/Number of Diggs widget. Like most of these widgets, a page containing them must phone home to the mothership (Digg) to obtain the "number of Diggs".

This caused unacceptable slowdowns in rendering the page. My browser would pause right where the Digg widget is going to be displayed while the Diggaplex was contacted and asked, first, was the script still good, and second, what the number of diggs for the bit now were. I had to disable the widget and just show our own link back to the Digg page so that interested users could follow it and do their own digging.

The next widget I tried was a simpler one, the addthis.com bookmark helper widget. The button is created by a php url that returns a small bit of javascript. The addthis-aplex must be contacted to check if the javascript is "Not modified", or not. Perhaps it also indulges in a bit more commnication, not sure. They certainly encourage use of the most advanced button.

Either way, there was an unacceptable pause in page rendering while this bookmark script was executed by the users browser. Unacceptable as in more than 100ms, sometimes 500ms. If the addthis-aplex was having issues, the page would probably stall at that point.

I'm not really sure if these rendering pauses are moved to the end of the page loading experience with a fully CSS driven layout. If I had time I'd certainly test this hypothesis. Nevertheless I think these widgets need to be faster. Who needs to add more rendering delays and the possibility of page rendering stalls if a supporting company is having a bad day?