Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example:
A faster BBC News front page
11–20 of 133 posts
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#12> It is available over HTTPS, and we have plans to redirect insecure traffic to HTTPS in the not-so-distant future.
~ curl -I https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 09:33:49 GMT
Location: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0
I realise this is being worked on and somewhat tangenital to this post, but the BBC's rollout of HTTPS has been shockingly poor and incredibly slow comapred to other news organisations. What's the point of serving account.bbc.co.uk securely if all links to sign in can be MitM'd? The parts that can be accessed with HTTPS don't seem to use HSTS either.
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#13Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png
I so agree with this. On mobile the BBC "Breaking News" popover is particularly annoying as you screen real estate is at such a premium and there's no keyboard to dismiss it.
The best solution I've come up with is immediately reloading the page in the hope that there's a cookie to stop the "Breaking News" showing again.
I'll just add, really like the new update. The new page feels much better (and the old one is really good already).
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#14I find that BBC News is one of the best sites on the entire web for browsing with NoScript. EDIT: This is what I get: http://imgur.com/a/Cg9sD
Serious? This is how the current homepage renders for me. http://imgur.com/a/8pDS0
And the new one is even worse (though it's a work-in-progress)
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#15I find that BBC News is one of the best sites on the entire web for browsing with NoScript. EDIT: This is what I get: http://imgur.com/a/Cg9sD
I find the opposite - without JS permitted for at least a couple of domains, one only sees the mobile site and extremely low resolution images.
Edit: And even with JS, images remain low resolution (or invisible) until you stop middle-button scrolling which makes for scanning through articles very painful.
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#16Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png
Please, please this. I don't care if news is just breaking. Just show me news in the order of importance. Or at the very very least, fix it so if I close the annoying breaking news box it doesn't jump back to the top of the page. Infuriating.
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#17> It is available over HTTPS, and we have plans to redirect insecure traffic to HTTPS in the not-so-distant future. ~ curl -I https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Type: text/html Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 09:33:49 GMT Location: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 0 What annoys me most about this is that there is a valid GlobalSign SSL certificate there and th…
HSTS is not something you can realistically implement until every path under the domain can be served via HTTPS. For the BBC this is problematic because there are hundreds of products and inter-dependencies under the bbc.co.uk/bbc.com endpoints. The amount of work required to do this is non-trivial, and not something that can be done in blanket - each product needs to test their product, its dependencies etc. There's also other issues like CDN endpoints (and the BBC uses several providers, including its own CDN), a relatively large and complex traffic management set up and the politics that comes with a relatively large organisation running a very big website.
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#18I mean, okay, it's faster than it was a year ago, but it's still considerably slower than it was a decade or so ago, before there was a plague of javascript o'er the land.
I miss when the major constraint on page load time was the server-side rendering time...
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#19> It is available over HTTPS, and we have plans to redirect insecure traffic to HTTPS in the not-so-distant future. ~ curl -I https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Type: text/html Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 09:33:49 GMT Location: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 0 What annoys me most about this is that there is a valid GlobalSign SSL certificate there and th…
Hi, BBC employee here (although not in News). Basically, we're working on it. The main issue is that by making a page HTTPS only, that all content also needs to be HTTPS too. We're working with our CDN providers to enable that (not only for new content, but for our archive too), and we also have to support a much longer tail of browsers and SSL configurations than other sites (China being an important market for us, and anecdotally I've heard we still get >1% IE7 from China, presumably from pirated XP machines) which makes it more complicated. It's not really an excuse, but there are people working very hard at enabling TLS without breaking the site for others. Other parts of the BBC website are available over HTTPS, hence the redirects that are in place. Similarly, we can't use HSTS as that applies to the whole domain.
Re: A faster BBC News front page
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
H2 support is happening at a much higher level (like, the BBC-wide infrastructure team level) but I think it's coming pretty soon. We did some testing and saw a positive impact on all front-end metrics: first paint, interactive, DOM complete, document onload.
Does Mr Butterworth help guide the H2 stuff?
Brandon's not really involved that high up the application stack.