It looks modern yet very readable thanks to great typography. Loads fast. Fully usable on mobile as well. E.g. Gets a hamburger menu on Mobile. The featured client animation is simpler. The spinning globe icon is replaced by a static image. They have absolutely top notch front end engineering talent.
This is in huge contrast to the current trend where they want to hijack browser's scrolling behavior for absolutely no gain to the end user.
More than likely that developer checked it in IE9 after seeing the great front-end design, and does not primarily browse the web in IE9 (what sane person would?)
Edit: he commented below saying it was IE11 with the IE9 emulation enabled.
IE11 has a feature, Emulation: Document Mode = IE9. No JS errors, so I assume it's a difference of how the "Document Mode = IE9" fails to actually emulate true IE9. Sorry for the false positive.
I recommend you look at image optimization. Loading the /nl flag page from NL takes > 9 seconds. On a connection with 20Mb/s down with one of the best ISPs available.
There are 3MB of images on the page; the problem seems to be the high-res map, which weights in at 1.5MB. This image is 2290x798 and it's in an element of 1145x399. I've halved the resolution and converted it to a JPEG, now it's 0.2MB. To make it even easier for you to show the designers I've uploaded it here: http://imgur.com/XcGllGz.
EDIT: it's worse, almost every image in the carousel is double-sized and unoptimized.
You are talking about the home page, right? Images are double size for retina displays. Your JPEG version is pointless, the flags are placed on top of the background and need an alpha channel. The page is indeed a bit heavy but not enough to impair the experience, first paint is still under 3s. Remember the audience for this page is 90% software developers, with powerful machines and high bandwidth.
I tend to use a combination on pngquant and optipng on most png based graphics. I'm sure there are builds for OSX out there (probably homebrew recipes even).
This will bring the color palette down to less than 256, some images will work better than others, in this case I didn't notice a difference and the size went from 434KB to 133KB in size using the batch file I normally use for this[1]... I haven't checked recently to see if there are newer tools/versions for use, I keep several utils inside my dropbox for windows usage.
> flags are placed on top of the background and need an alpha channel
Ok, that explains the huge PNGs; can't they be rendered as-is (i.e. include part of the background in the foreground picture?
> first paint is still under 3s
That's really slow. The jankey animation (yay Apple) and rasterized image rendering is horrible; it's a throwback to the late-90s internet.
> the audience for this page is 90% software developers,
> with powerful machines and high bandwidth.
I.e. me, and I find it horribly slow. I'm using a year old rMBP and I have a pretty good internet connection (20MB/s, 10x what I could get in the UK and I actually get pretty close to the max all the time; for a comparison: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2014/08/internet-speed-gap-...).
Sure, I'd love fiber, but that's not exactly broadly available (though if I could move my house 1km to the east I'd have it).
I'm on a late-2013 rMBP running Yosemite. The page looks nice and animates smoothly in both Chrome and Safari. There may be some deeper problem on your system.
It looks modern yet very readable thanks to great typography. Loads fast. Fully usable on mobile as well. E.g. Gets a hamburger menu on Mobile. The featured client animation is simpler. The spinning globe icon is replaced by a static image. They have absolutely top notch front end engineering talent.
This is in huge contrast to the current trend where they want to hijack browser's scrolling behavior for absolutely no gain to the end user.