If you include the JavaScript file at the end of the HTML body, rather than in the head, it will download after the page is rendered, so the loading time shouldn't be noticeable.
I am skeptical of this claim.
Does your browser never become unresponsive at unpredictable times? Mine (Firefox 3.6) does.(Firefox 4 is much worse, BTW.) Since I use Flashblock, I tend to believe that the main cause of these lapses is javascript though I am willing to listen to arguments to the contrary.
MathJax requires memory for one thing (after it has been running a while, Firefox uses about 500 megs of my memory) which would tend to cause delays when something needs to be paged out or in. And can you assure me that all of the memory leaks in Firefox have been plugged?
I do know that (about 2.5 years ago) when this community was on Overcoming Bias, which at the time was hosted on Typepad, its responsiveness improved drastically on my admittedly very slow (P III) machine when I started using Adblock Plus to prevent Google Analytics's JavaScript from running.
I am also concerned about the administrative demands of MathJax since what technical talent Less Wrong had available to it has not always responded quickly to spam on the site and has not implemented simple uncontroversial changes that have very broad support (such as a place to put meetup announcement to keep them off the front page).
I do welcome more math here, but I am skeptical that the benefits of MathJax or similar solutions would outweigh the negatives on this site. I know that a lot of the web is heavy with JavaScript, but then a lot of the web kinda sucks, and I get the impression that JavaScript is a big part of the cause of the suckiness.
ADDED. Those in favor of MathJax: do you want it for comments or just for top-level posts?
Alright, let me qualify my statement. The HTTP request/response time to fetch the .js file will happen after the page is loaded, as will the parsing and execution of it. This is an improvement over putting it in the head of the page.
The time you're concerned about is the time for actually running the math typesetting code. Because the browser's JavaScript execution model is blocking and single-threaded (at least until we get web workers widely supported), a non-trivial computation can cause a hiccup in initial page performance.
This is mitigated somewhat if...
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!