The claim that Twitter "Lite" is an improvement is a collective delusion of the web development community, spread by Google and Twitter PWA evangelists. By every measure, except 'shininess', it performs worse that both Twitter.com and the old legacy mobile.twitter.com (which can still be accessed if you set your user agent to something like a Blackberry).
Even from a warm cache, Twitter Lite takes longer to display your timeline compared to desktop Twitter. Compared to the legacy mobile twitter site, the PWA version is 15x slower at showing your timeline [1]
And this is all the while ignoring the UX annoyances of the PWA version. When loading the timeline, you're presented with about three different loaders, all flashing about the screen.
But first load (and repeat loads of the first page you visit) is the only thing that matters. The primary use case of Twitter is the timeline - if you've made displaying that slower, you failed to make a faster site. You blew it.
Of course I know nothing about the complexities of Twitter internally and technically, but I don't understand how they managed to make it slower than the Desktop Twitter, and claim that they built a better experience when they clearly haven't.
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Edit: I just did a tiny bit of by-the-eye comparisons between Desktop Twitter and Twitter Lite, and loading Notifications seems a bit faster on Twitter Lite. Loading Profile might be the tiniest bit faster on Twitter Lite, but I suspect there's a lot of DOM jank that slows displaying the next page. Showing DMs is slower on Twitter Lite compared to Desktop Twitter.
But even so, what does this have to do with the PWAs that Google+Twitter evangelise? My understanding is that PWAs are all about speeding up the warm-cache 'first load' [1], and once that's loaded, there's not really much that the PWA technologies will do for you. Both Desktop Twitter and Twitter Lite are Single Page Apps that fetch views from API calls - there's nothing inherently different about Twitter Lite's approach that will make it faster at that compared to Desktop.
[1]: 'First load' seems to be the wrong name to call this, but unsure of a better, more concise phrase.
> The primary use case of Twitter is the timeline - if you've made displaying that slower, you failed to make a faster site. You blew it.
The timeline isn't a single page, it effectively scrolls in infinitely. And maybe it's just me, but as I read Twitter I very frequently tap on a tweet to see expended content, the bio of who wrote it, and so on.
Maybe I'm the anomaly! But you know who'd know? Twitter. They'll have a huge analytic dataset telling them exactly how people interact with their site. Maybe they tailored Twitter Lite to that?
Time and time again on Hacker News you see people assess a project with a base assumption that the creators are basically idiots. Maybe give the Twitter devs the benefit of the doubt about how they prioritised features.
My 'issue', which is wildly off topic from the original post, is that Twitter Lite is hailed as the epitome of Progressive Web Apps by both Google and Twitter. Google helped Twitter build it.
They claim that it's a faster site because of PWA, but the site is slower where all the PWA technologies would help out. Where there are speed improvements, it's got nothing to do with service workers.
Even from a warm cache, Twitter Lite takes longer to display your timeline compared to desktop Twitter. Compared to the legacy mobile twitter site, the PWA version is 15x slower at showing your timeline [1]
And this is all the while ignoring the UX annoyances of the PWA version. When loading the timeline, you're presented with about three different loaders, all flashing about the screen.
[1]: https://twitter.com/joshhunt/status/980769162770485249