When Twitter launched “new Twitter” in 2010, a lot of people decried it as a bad idea. The big change was sending every request to the site to one URL, which hosted a JavaScript application that requested the appropriate data and then converted it to HTML within the browser. Here’s Tim Bray explaining exactly why Twitter’s approach was wrongheaded.
About a year ago, Twitter platform engineer Dan Webb wrote an article rejecting hash-bang as well, which made it pretty clear that Twitter would be moving away from this architecture.
Today, Dan Webb has posted an official announcement that Twitter is dumping the “render everything in JavaScript” approach for performance reasons:
Looking at the components that make up this measurement, we discovered that the raw parsing and execution of JavaScript caused massive outliers in perceived rendering speed. In our fully client-side architecture, you don’t see anything until our JavaScript is downloaded and executed. The problem is further exacerbated if you do not have a high-specification machine or if you’re running an older browser. The bottom line is that a client-side architecture leads to slower performance because most of the code is being executed on our user’s machines rather than our own.
It feels good to see terrible ideas die, even when it takes awhile.
May 30, 2012 at 7:24 am
Wow, great news, even if the data they ended up collecting about apparent render-time should have been obvious to them. Kudos to Twitter for making the right choice.
May 30, 2012 at 7:01 pm
They probably just had a couple JS fanboys working for them at the time.