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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#61

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...

It's also hilarious to look at the page without javascript. At least there's something there?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#62

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.

Looks pretty much the same here though a slightly different setup:

- Chrome Version 58.0.3029.81 beta (64-bit) - uMatrix 1.0.0 - uBlock Origin 1.12.1 - Privacy Badger 2017.4.19.1

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#63

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

I get the same as the first image.

Firefox 53.0 (64-bit). uBlock origin, HTTPS Everywhere, Decentraleyes, and Javascript Toggle.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#64
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.

H2 is already happening: https://twitter.com/tdp_org/status/851470269508202497

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#65
Until the internet marketing team loads it up with scripts that inject 12 different versions of jQuery to do some a/b testing.

I wish engineers would actually be able to take responsibility for the whole, and dismiss marketing tags based on technical grounds.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#66

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…

Thanks! We'll take a look at this ASAP. In the mean time, I guess all I can do is apologise for the broken experience...

We use a technique called cutting the mustard to determine whether a browser is modern (read: >=IE9). This allows us to write one set of CSS that should work in pretty much any web browser (we call this the "core" experience), and another set that uses modern-ish CSS (the "enhanced" experience). One of the major drawbacks to this technique is that the technique relies on JS — it is literally just modernBrowser = ('addEventListener' in window && 'querySelector' in document && 'localStorage' in window).

So when you browse the BBC News website with JS disabled, you are getting a page that has been styled to work on a Nokia E65, BlackBerry OS4, IE8, and everything in between. Unfortunately right now we don't have a way to give you the enhanced version of the page without JS. In the future it might be possible for us cut the mustard at the server (or the CDN edge) based on User-Agent but that isn't something I can see happening in the foreseeable.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#67
post #48
post #46

This does feel a lot faster, but hasn't fixed my pet peeve (on bbc.com): clicking on a link to a news article and getting taken to the wrong one because the ads loaded and everything moved just as I clicked. This often happens to me 3 or 4 times in a row. Space needs to be blocked out for ads as soon as the page renders.

Yes! For me its the lazy loading of the images (not necessarily ads). Just as you are about to click on a link, the whole page jumps down and you end up clicking the wrong link. And then you click the back button, and the same thing happens again. So, you end up just having to wait 5-10 seconds for all the images to load just to ensure that you don't mis-click on the next article.

Press ESC, it stops the page loading and everything freezes as-is. It's how I get around this exact problem on lots of sites due to my slow net.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#68
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,…

Slightly off topic, but can you please allow fallback when there is no Flash. The player works, but you have to hack you user-agent string to get it. I don't have Flash in Firefox and the BBC news is only site, that I visit regularly, for which this is an issue.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#70

Oh no; the BBC is the site i use when I need something served over HTTP, not HTTPS.

Just to clarify: We aren't redirecting HTTP -> HTTPS and don't have any plans to do so, at least in the short-term. All we're doing is enabling HTTPS for bbc.{com,co.uk}/news because at the moment we issue a 301 for HTTPS -> HTTP.
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