Twitter Improves Site Speed by Dumping Hash-Bangs

Twitter stamp image created for Tutorial9 by Dawghouse Design StudioBack 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:

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

2 Comments

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I still see #!

Reply

They still exist on user pages. Twitter has only updated links for tweets (so far).

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