Twitter Changes Incoming: Faster Speeds, No More Hashbang URLs

Twitter yesterday announced several major infrastructure changes that it would roll out to its site in the coming weeks on the Twitter Engineering blog. The changes are all aimed at optimizing speeds on Twitter, not only for displaying pages to users, but also when writing tweets.

According to Dan Webb, Twitter’s Engineering Manager,? the company decided to move the rendering to the server which dropped the initial page loading time to 1/5th of what it has been on the old Twitter architecture. Users benefit from this approach as well as their browser’s rendering performance now has less of an impact when it comes to these loading times.

There are a variety of options for improving the performance of our JavaScript, but we wanted to do even better. We took the execution of JavaScript completely out of our render path. By rendering our page content on the server and deferring all JavaScript execution until well after that content has been rendered, we’ve dropped the time to first Tweet to one-fifth of what it was.

In addition, permalink urls on Twitter are no longer using hasbangs (#!)? to reduce page loading times on pages that made use of them further.? The removal gets rid of a lengthy process that Webb describes in the blog post:

When you come to twitter.com, we want you to see content as soon as possible. With hashbang URLs, the browser needs to download an HTML page, download and execute some JavaScript, recognize the hashbang path (which is only visible to the browser), then fetch and render the content for that URL. By removing the need to handle routing on the client, we remove many of these steps and reduce the time it takes for you to find out what’s happening on twitter.com.

Twitter finally made changes to the JavaScript architecture on the site, by arranging all code as CommonJS modules delivered via AMD.

Twitter users will find that part of the architectural changes are already in place, for instance on the permalink pages, while other changes are going to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Are you noticing speed improvements when opening permalinks on Twitter?

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday May 30, 2012 -
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Yahoo Axis Launched, Changes how you Search on the Internet

The basic search concept has not really evolved in the past decade or so. People visit a search engine like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo, enter? a search term there, and wait for the results listing to be displayed to them. This is usually displayed in a table-like vertical format, with every search engine throwing in some extra features at the top or sides of the results.

The very same process is imitated when you use the browser’s search bar instead, with the difference that you do not have to open the search engine’s web page manually to use the form there.

Yahoo Axis is a search experiment that tries to redefine web search. It is available for a number of platforms, including Apple’s iOS operating system, but also for the desktop in form of add-ons and plugins for popular browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

In Firefox, Yahoo Axis places a small search bar at the bottom left corner of the screen, right above the browser’s status bar if you have enabled it. When you enter a search term there, you will notice that results are automatically displayed as thumbnails in the lower screen area.

You see a list of suggestions on the far left that let you refine the search term, and then the actual search results that you have to scroll horizontally. You can use the mouse wheel for that comfortably, or click on the left and right buttons to scroll to the results instead.

Each result represents a website, which is displayed with a thumbnail screenshot, the title of the page, and part of the url. When you hover over the thumbnail, you will see the full url being displayed in the browser’s lower left corner. A left-click opens the result’s page in the same browser tab, a middle-click in a new tab, at least in Firefox.

When you look at how Axis has been designed, you will probably notice that it is seems optimized for touch. You can flip right through the results on your Apple devices with a flick of the finger, and selections are improved as it is easier to hit a thumbnail link than a standard text link.

For desktop users, the add-on may be a bit on the annoying side of things, considering that it is displayed in the lower left screen corner all the time. I’d expect Yahoo to implement at least an on and off switch for each supported browser to turn it on or off easily. I’d also like to see customization options, for instance to increase the size of the thumbnail area, or even have the add-on display two rows of thumbnail results at once.

Users who log into their Yahoo account get automatic synchronization of history and settings, so that the data is available on all supported devices, so that you can continue your browsing session on another device.

The image search that Axis provides is actually pretty good. You need to click on Search Web in the lower left corner of the screen, and switch to Images there to do that. You will now see two rows of image search results that is scrolling endlessly. That in itself is a nice representation, when you click on an image, it is displayed in an image browser on screen. Once you have the image browser displayed, you can use it as well to go through all the results one by one.Yahoo Axis is available at Apple’s Appstore, and for desktop browsers at the official Axis website.I personally think it needs some work done to it on the desktop, whereas it might really be a solid alternative for tablets and smartphones, provided that you won’t mind using Yahoo Search for your web searches. According to Yahoo, an Android version is currently in development.Yahoo Search Assist
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Yahoo integrating Delicious into search results

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday May 24, 2012 -
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