Twitter Improves Site Speed by Dumping Hash-Bangs

Back in September 2010 Twitter changed how its site renders by pushing much of the processing to the web browser using JavaScript and hash-bang (#!) URLs. Today Twitter has announced it is essentially dumping that approach:

To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we’ve been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server. This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.

Surprising no one that I am the kind of guy who would say this: I told you so, Twitter.

The rest of the Twitter post explains why #! URLs are not the best solution for rendering content quickly and consistently. Sadly, not every type of Twitter page will see this update as I noted last week:

In early 2011 I wrote about #! in URLs as bad (rosel.li/020911). @Twitter has almost got it—#! removed from tweet URLs *only* so far.

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) May 23, 2012

Congratulations to Twitter for making parts of its site five times faster than its broken implementation.