| I think this has come up on HN enough that people probably already know about these alternatives, but I really recommend using a Nitter front-end to browse Twitter if you don't actively maintain a Twitter account. It doesn't help if like Eevee you do have an account and are actually tweeting, but if all you're doing is browsing then it runs completely Javascript-free. ---- In regards to the actual content of the article, it's an eye-opening experience to dig into how a lot of these pages are constructed and to realize that sites like Google search, Facebook, Twitter are not really designed around having the simplest most performant implementations. There is some dark eldritch magic that happens behind the scenes on a lot of these sites that keeps them working with accessibility readers and nothing else: trying to make it harder to find hrefs, trying to get rid of right-click open in new tab commands, trying to make it impossible for browser extensions to identify parts of the HTML. And I think it's really easy at first to say, "this is a complicated problem we don't understand, of course this must be a super-performant hyper-optimized way of doing everything." But it just becomes harder and harder to justify that over time. The link wrapping that Google search does really doesn't have anything to do with performance, it's designed to close holes around how people open links without sending pingbacks to Google servers. There is a real incentive battle between tracking/control and simplicity/performance/flexibility, and the performance side doesn't always win, it seems that big companies are actually willing to introduce a huge amount of engineering complexity for an outcome that's almost as good as a normal href but that allows them to accomplish other goals as well. The level of complexity in these sites sometimes gets used as an excuse to avoid criticism, but I think that sometimes the complexity is there purely because sites are actually fighting with browser technology; Google's setup for link wrapping is very complicated, Twitter's text entry is very complicated, because they're trying to take control of a process that they don't normally have control over. So they build very complicated houses of cards that fall over in weird situations, and the complexity of the house of cards becomes the defense against criticism that the house of cards keeps falling over. I look at projects like Nitter; Nitter is not a full Twitter replacement, but in regards to the parts of Twitter that it does replace, it's better engineered. It's less complicated, the engineering is less impressive, but impressive engineering is not the same thing as good engineering. For the features it's replicating, Nitter works better than the real thing, and I think the reason is that it's less complicated and that it's fighting less with the browser. |