How does this work, is he reporting compressed or uncompressed sizes of data? text/css/js compresses really well for transmission, images do not.
User-defined image backgrounds can also be up to 800k-ish for twitter too right?
A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
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Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#12The first tweet is 2 MB. How much is the second?
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#13His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.
A more accurate title might be "The Twitter web client is 2.0 MB."
The problem is that Twitter broke links to tweet pages by using the #! URL structure. Now you can't load a tweet page without loading the entire app. That's bad.
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#14No wonder it takes long for Twitter pages to load. Such things show up only when you're on slower speeds.
Exactly - just set your phone to EDGE and pull up a tweet page in your mobile browser and you'll see how long it takes. And not only for the 1st page load but for all others too. I can pull up a Facebook page (while being logged in) and have that served to me in a fraction of the time it takes for Twitter. Compare that to the feature-set and your opinion will change quickly. Just try it, no stats & graphs needed, you'll see...
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#15The web will be a better place once everyone has 100mbps and servers have 10gbps. Sites like the verge can load in one second without caching.
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#16I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old less-AJAXy versions on a really slow internet connection with a bit of packet loss
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#17No wonder it takes long for Twitter pages to load. Such things show up only when you're on slower speeds.
Exactly - just set your phone to EDGE and pull up a tweet page in your mobile browser and you'll see how long it takes. And not only for the 1st page load but for all others too. I can pull up a Facebook page (while being logged in) and have that served to me in a fraction of the time it takes for Twitter. Compare that to the feature-set and your opinion will change quickly. Just try it, no stats & graphs needed, you…
Honestly, Facebook's load time is quite phenomenal. It is one of the most feature-laden and complex consumer web applications out there and they still manage to set the bar with regards to speed and multi-platform usability.
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#18All of the comments here could be shortened to "It's cached so it doesn't matter" as if the main problem was "2 MB is too large hence loading is too slow".
But the problem here (according to the author and I tend to agree with him) is that one needs to load too much junk for too little actual content; whether the junk in question is cached or not.
Now, ideally, a tweet's 140 characters shouldn't weight 2 MB but Twitter users need tools to act upon those tweets: re-tweet, follow a link, etc. and those tools come with a cost.
A relatively high cost but one we can afford, with the help of caching.
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#19His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.
But it is still bad that you need to suffer through the initial load (at least once).
EDIT: There are still many devices and locations that do not have high speed access. Just because a page loads quickly (relatively) due to the fact that you are sitting on top of a OC192 link does not mean that the load time is dog slow for say someone in Rwanda.
In fact, web devs should review their sites through a network simulator as part of the QA process.
Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB
#20The web will be a better place once everyone has 100mbps and servers have 10gbps. Sites like the verge can load in one second without caching.
Wirth’s Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.