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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#31

Post by whatismyip »

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…

You're right, it's not a problem for account.bbc.com, which off the back off your parent comment I've raised pull requests to get HSTS added. To answer why that subdomain exists: firstly cookie compartmentalisation allows us to set particularly sensitive cookies off to a separate domain, as well as allowing us to do different arrangements for traffic management separate from www.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#32

Post by alex95 »

I used to use the BBC as my primary source of information when I wanted news that was not over-dramatised. It was great; no click-bait, not too biased news, and things I actually cared about.

Recently though, the BBC have gone against everything that I appreciated before. It actually reminds me of Buzzfeed, which I have to say isn't a compliment. Clickbait, leading headlines, you name it...

When did the world ever stop caring about real issues, and instead started caring about 'Top 10 Ways that you know you hate your job (The 4th might shock you!)'?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#33

Post by acdha »

DamonHD wrote: post #7

I would also like the site NOT to be sending me a tonne of nugatory whitespace in the HTML, and to enable gzip/deflate as a minmum to reduce bandwidth...

Compression shows every sign of being enabled so there's little downside to any whitespace in the HTML:

https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2F

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_79_P0Q/1/details/#...

If you're not seeing transfer encoding, is it possible that you're behind some sort of proxy – network or local antivirus – which is stripping it?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#34

Post by malza »

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…

It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#35

Post by noir_lord »

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…

I just block it with Ublock Origin.

It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying.

For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#36

Post by afandian »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #22
afandian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for your reply!

- Chrome Version 57.0.2987.133 (64-bit)

- No-Script Live 0.2.4 http://mybrowseraddon.com/noscript-lite.html

- Privacy Badger 2017.4.19.1

FWIW Privacy Badger isn't blocking anything, I think this is all from script blocking. I notice that low-res images get sent by default, which suggests that the design conflates 'no script' with 'mobile'? That's not true at least in my case.

Here's my browser log. https://gist.github.com/afandian/b97fc7bb9f5e15f924acb770322...

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#38

Post by bbcbreaking »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #24
bbcbreaking wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is at least an improvement. But can't the breaking news only appear if something breaks after I load the page, rather than on initial load? Even then... give me an option to set a cookie to never see it please.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#39

Post by JonAtkinson »

rsynnott wrote: post #18

I 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...

According to my Safari console, it's loading the page on average in 50ms, with some samples as low as 20ms. That's considerably less than the blink of an eye (at 100ms).

I doubt that a decade-old CPU/OS and a decade old browser were rendering any page (even without JS) at that kind of speed.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#40

Post by afandian »

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…

I thought as much. My tweet that contained the screenshot: https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234

Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial.

Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.

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