04 Jun Twitter Comes to Senses
Almost two years ago, Twitter launched their so called #NewTwitter web platform. The Twitter developers claim that it provides them easier development paths and better performance, but I found it really annoying to use, because of the way it dynamically loads everything on the page from their REST API. My main peeves were the generally ridiculous load time (it takes a long long time to make all those requests), and the incessant flashing of page themes as it slowly figures out what page you’re trying to look at.
Well it looks like the Twitter engineers have finally come back to their senses a bit and are moving back toward server based rendering. Rejoice! According to their post on the matterthey’re dropping the silly #! URLs, reducing effective load time (or time to first tweet as they call it, since it’s behind a bunch of AJAX) by 80%. 80%!! They’re also doing some clever modularization of their JavaScript libraries, which will hopefully also improve load times.
All I have to say is about time. Since the #NewTwitter launch I’ve hated having to go to the website and I’ve avoided it like the plague. In this era of optimizing load times it’s surprising they didn’t realize this was a huge turn off earlier. For a long time I’ve railed against what I see as “AJAX for the sake of AJAX” as it just provides a bad user experience. Hopefully Twitter will be showing the way to web developers everywhere that initial load times are a key part of initial user (and customer) experience, and having a bad experience leads to lost users.