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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#21

Post by wldlyinaccurate »

afandian wrote: post #11

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: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive).

There is a small improvement to the banner on the new front page (/news/0), which is that it's about 4 pixels shorter, and it's now grey instead of black which I think is much less abrasive.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#22

Post by wldlyinaccurate »

afandian wrote: post #14
kristianc wrote: post #3

I 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) http://imgur.com/a/IPr3U

Wow, this is awful. Would you mind telling me what combination of settings/add-ons you have so that we can reproduce this?

Our "no JS" fallback styles are not done in a very nice way at the moment: they rely on the browser reading noscript tags. We never did any testing with NoScript or similar add-ons, and I remember hearing somewhere that those sort of add-ons don't always evaluate noscript tags.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#23

Post by dingaling »

afandian wrote: post #14
kristianc wrote: post #3

I 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) http://imgur.com/a/IPr3U

Another hindrance when browsing without JavaScript is that changing to a news sub-region ( e.g. Northern Ireland ) requires three jumps-and-clicks to the bottom of the page. A CSS-based menu would be a wonderful alternative.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#24

Post by wldlyinaccurate »

bbcbreaking wrote: post #16
afandian wrote: post #11

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: 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.

On your last point — the new breaking news banner doesn't have the infuriating jump-to-top behaviour. At the moment the new banner is only on the new front page but I think we're going to backport it to other pages in the not-so-distant future.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#25

Post by deanCommie »

afandian wrote: post #11

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: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The problem isn't the breaking news banner. If aliens make contact with humanity, you better believe I want an intrusive popup. The problem is what the editorial board considers breaking news has been completely diluted and diminished both for the BBC and CNN

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#26

Post by the6threplicant »

It's a great site but internationally the ads ruin the experience. You think you've clicked on a link but the site still hasn't loaded all of its ads and you have clicked on the wrong link.

Also waiting 30 seconds for a video ad to see 10 seconds of content is kinda stupid.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#27

Post by lol768 »

cnorthwood wrote: post #19
lol768 wrote: post #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 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,…

> Similarly, we can't use HSTS as that applies to the whole domain

Is this a problem for e.g. account.bbc.com though? I can't see how that can impact bbc.com/bbc.co.uk if the header is set on the subdomain only.

I remember it used to be that e.g. news was accessed via news.bbc.co.uk but this seems to have been changed more recently to be accessible at /news. As you note, this makes HSTS a no-go because of all the other products on the same domain need to support HTTPS. This makes me wonder why this change was made in the first place. It would also seemingly mean that (without e.g. https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/) an XSS in one product means an XSS everywhere.

I'm sympathetic re. the SSL configurations you need to deal with and it's reassuring that this is being worked on.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#28

Post by chaz6 »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #8
chaz6 wrote: post #4

Supporting http/2 will improve performance too!

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.

That's great to know :-)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#29

Post by cnorthwood »

lol768 wrote: post #27
cnorthwood wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Similarly, we can't use HSTS as that applies to the whole domain Is this a problem for e.g. account.bbc.com though? I can't see how that can impact bbc.com/bbc.co.uk if the header is set on the subdomain only. I remember it used to be that e.g. news was accessed via news.bbc.co.uk but this seems to have been changed more recently to be accessible at /news. As you note, this makes HSTS a no-go because of all the oth…

Ah true, I'm not close enough with the detail of some of the subdomains to know what's going on there.

A few years ago a decision was made that the BBC site should be all under www.bbc.co.uk, I believe this was mostly for marketing purposes, but also to simplify our internal routing for the site. news.bbc.co.uk was previously separate as News had it's own infrastructure separate from other parts of the BBC, but that's been rationalised now (leaking subdomains for technical reasons was something we frown upon).

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#30

Post by nailer »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #21
afandian wrote: post #11

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: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive). There is a small improvement to…

Who cares if editorial thinks it matters and you think it makes things worse? Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.
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