Twitter has re-engineered its microblogging website to load tweets five times faster than before, as part of its attempts to keep its user’s interest in browsing its regular stream of short messages.
This check will also prepare twitter for the next generation of browsers by laying the ground for more useful and interactive features.
“This new framework will help us rapidly develop new Twitter features, take advantage of new browser technology, and ultimately provide the best experience to as many people as possible,” said Twitter engineer Dan Webb in a blog post.
The modifications, which are being currently shown across Twitter.com, will also do away with the “hashbang” symbol in its web page urls.
The “#!” symbol in Twitter URLs was used as to inform the browsers to extract and translate tweets which are requested by the user, but now majority of that work will be managed by Twitter’s own servers.
These modifications were made after twitter engineers interrogated the “time to first tweet” that the Twitter website delivered. This figures, based on a sample of users, indicates how long between clicking on a link on Twitter.com and tweets displaying on-screen.
They explored that a lot of delays happened by the way the site told web browsers to make use of JavaScript.
The new twitter website will remove a big JavaScript processing burden, converting raw tweet data into the HTML in which web pages are encoded from the web browser and puts it on Twitter’s servers.
“The bottom line is that [the old] architecture leads to slower performance because most of the code is being executed on our user’s machines rather than our own,” Mr Webb explained.
“By rendering our page content on the server and deferring all JavaScript execution until well after that content has been rendered, we’ve dropped the time to first Tweet to one-fifth of what it was.”
According to third party data which was published in 2011, nearly one third of Twitter users access the service through its site rather than a client such as Tweetdeck.
Majority of the websites are completely aware of how slow loading of the web pages can irritate the visitors. Google, for example, has spent great amount of money on its own worldwide network of fibre optic cabling as part of its attempts to keep avoid their attention trekking.
