Blog

I have a blog over on Blogger at http://blog.adrianroselli.com/. I post regularly about trends and news in web development, usability, accessibility, social media, best practices, and anything else falls into the very broad category of "web related." Below is just the latest post from my blog, with links to more entries on the side. You can save yourself some hassle and just subscribe to the RSS feed and let it come to you.

Twitter Improves Site Speed by Dumping Hash-Bangs

Twitter stamp image created for Tutorial9 by Dawghouse Design Studio Back in September 2010 Twitter changed how its site renders by pushing much of the processing to the web browser using JavaScript and hash-bang (#!) URLs. Today Twitter has announced it is essentially dumping that approach:

To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server. This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.

Surprising no one that I am the kind of guy who would say this: I told you so, Twitter.

The rest of the Twitter post explains why #! URLs are not the best solution for rendering content quickly and consistently. Sadly, not every type of Twitter page will see this update as I noted last week:

In early 2011 I wrote about #! in URLs as bad (rosel.li/020911). @Twitter has almost got it—#! removed from tweet URLs *only* so far.
— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) May 23, 2012

Congratulations to Twitter for making parts of its site five times faster than its broken implementation.

May-29-2012
See it on the blog with any comments.