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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#51

Post by corobo »

afandian wrote: post #36
wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I notice that low-res images get sent by default, which suggests that the design conflates 'no script' with 'mobile'

Could also be javascript-powered lazy loading. Load the low res using HTML then swap out high-res when the user scrolls it into view

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#52

Post by tomelders »

The BBC news page should be a HN/reddit style list, with some enhancements to identify specific story types.

Every news outlet's landing page is a UX disaster, that only meets the needs of the organisations ego, and not the needs of an actual user.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#54

Post by afandian »

corobo wrote: post #51
afandian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I notice that low-res images get sent by default, which suggests that the design conflates 'no script' with 'mobile' Could also be javascript-powered lazy loading. Load the low res using HTML then swap out high-res when the user scrolls it into view

I'm talking about the thinking that led to this, not the mechanism by which it works.

Why would you send a low resolution copy of the image first? Probably because you assume someone is on a low-bandwidth connection.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#55

Post by bbcbreaking »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #50
bbcbreaking wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll raise this with our product team. I think it's totally reasonable to expect the banner not to appear as soon as you load the page — if there's a breaking news story, it will already be on the page, right? So there's no need to also pop up a banner with the same story. But —this is a big "but"— I wouldn't expect this to happen soon. Changes take a long time at the BBC :)

Thank you! I've been very close to stopping using the BBC news site recently due to the breaking news banner.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#56

Post by corobo »

afandian wrote: post #54
corobo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I notice that low-res images get sent by default, which suggests that the design conflates 'no script' with 'mobile' Could also be javascript-powered lazy loading. Load the low res using HTML then swap out high-res when the user scrolls it into view

I'm talking about the thinking that led to this, not the mechanism by which it works. Why would you send a low resolution copy of the image first? Probably because you assume someone is on a low-bandwidth connection.

To make the page load faster (the topic of this post)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#57

Post by DamonHD »

acdha wrote: post #33
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?

Always direct.

Today is the first time I've seen gzip actually happen though! If only all my other problems were so easily solved by whining!

But still: sending, compressing, uncompressing stuff that definitely adds no value and would be trivial to statically omit almost all of is still a downside...

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#58

Post by untog »

afandian wrote: post #40
wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#59

Post by Angostura »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #6
deanclatworthy wrote: post #2

Great. I religiously visit BBC news throughout the day. This definitely loads quicker than before. That said, there is performance and then there is perceived performance. Why introduce an arbitrary fade-in animation on the images (aka a delay)? Just show them as soon as they are available from the lazy-loader. This makes it feel slower for me.

Agreed! Glad you mentioned the image fade-in. I was actually speaking to our UX team about it the other day, and I think we might get rid of it \o/

It was the one thing I noticed actually. The loading speed seemed about the same to me (its always loaded quickly here) but I found the fade-in really quite distracting. If you could pass on my downvote :)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#60

Post by Angostura »

tomelders wrote: post #52

The BBC news page should be a HN/reddit style list, with some enhancements to identify specific story types. Every news outlet's landing page is a UX disaster, that only meets the needs of the organisations ego, and not the needs of an actual user.

Switch to Lynx.
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