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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#81

Post by michaelt »

JonAtkinson wrote: post #39
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.

2.23s here, including images - https://imgur.com/a/9Kpxp

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#82

Post by narrowtux »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #80

React is only used on the server. We do not load it in the browser. My apologies in advance for my ignorance, as I have so far read about React, but not actually used it. Isn't the main advantage of React the virtual DOM it sets up and its reconciliation algorithm with the DOM? How can this be applied without using on the client side? Wouldn't all the responsive aspects be lost, requiring a round trip to the server f…

Maybe they just like to code with a component based framework, but don't actually need dynamic components.

That means it would just be a different way to use templates on the server side.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#83

Post by ThomaszKrueger »

And this has a sort-of easter egg: if you open developer tools in Chrome when at the page, they invite you to apply for developer jobs:

Hi there! Do you want to help build a fast and accessible web experience used by over 300 million people around the world each month? We're hiring people for all sorts of roles. Head on over to http://careerssearch.bbc.co.uk/ (search for "News") to find out more!

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#84

Post by ape4 »

deanCommie wrote: post #25
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

Breaking news: Spicer holds press conference.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#85

Post by SippinLean »

noir_lord wrote: post #35
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 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".

I just realized that wasn't an ad; I've never read the text because the placement/intrusiveness triggered my ad blindness, I've blocked it with ublock as well.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#86

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#87

Post by f055 »

The OP explicitly mentions a "Mobile - Emerging Markets" speed test, which is a nice benchmark. I sometimes try to browse the web on EDGE or weak 3G, and 99% of sites do not load in reasonable time, or at all. The old-wide-web of 56k modems would be perfect for it, but websites and javascripts got really obese nowadays:

* 14KB site https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_EP_VE7/

* 443KB bbc https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_RQ_VK2/

* 3652KB the verge, of course https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_44_WCC/

But I applaud BBC's effort, I hope to see lighter and faster web even though we move to Fiber and 4G.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#88

Post by cnorthwood »

rythie wrote: post #68
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,…

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.

This is again something we're working on, a lot of it matters which video you're trying to watch. Because of reasons* some videos get transcoded into codecs that don't play in all browsers, hence Flash by default on News. In the mean time, you can opt in to the HTML5 by default trial: http://www.bbc.co.uk/html5

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#90

Post by cnorthwood »

rntksi wrote: post #45

always love how you optimise the news front page. are you guys still running the Perl backend and "Html Put" :) @joseph_wynn ? a former BBC News CSD here.

Nope, the Perl backend went away a long time ago! (at the point of switching from news.bbc.co.uk -> www.bbc.co.uk/news). The site is dynamically generated at origin now.
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