Twitter widget update
A few weeks ago I had Chrome Dev Tools open while loading my personal website and noticed the following console messages:
I have a Twitter widget in my web page. I think this notice of deprecation is interesting. I use several 3rd party widgets and have never noticed a developer-targeted warning like this. Perhaps it’s done frequently, but this was the first time I saw anything like this.
I really appreciated the heads up. The previous Twitter widget loaded a script synchronously causing bad performance. I had “asyncified” the snippet by reverse engineering the code. (See slides 11-18 from my Fluent High Performance Snippets presentation.) This was about an hour of work and resulted in ~40 lines of additional JavaScript in my page.
The new Twitter snippet is asynchronous – yay! I’m able to replace my hack with one line of markup and one line of JavaScript. All the options I want (size, color, etc.) are available. I just did the update today and am looking forward to seeing if it reduces my onload metrics.
Getting consumers to update old snippet code is a challenge for snippet owners. This is why so many sites use bootstrap scripts. The downside is bootstrap scripts typically result in two script downloads resulting in a slower snippet rendering time.
An interesting study that could be done with data from the HTTP Archive would be to analyze the adoption of new snippets. For example, tracking the migration from urchin.js to ga.js, or widgets.twimg.com/.../widget.js to platform.twitter.com/widgets.js. This would require a way to identify the before and after script. Correlating this with the techniques used to motivate website owners to change their code could help identify some best practices.
Twitter’s technique of logging warnings to console worked for me, but I don’t know how long ago they offered the async snippet version. Perhaps I’ve been lagging for months. I bet we could identify other good (and bad) techniques for evangelizing a massive code upgrade for third party widgets. That would be a good thing.
Charlie | 16-Jul-13 at 6:54 am | Permalink |
Keeping up to date is another argument in favour of replacing such widgets with server-side code talking to the API. Sure, you can’t just add a line of code to the site but you’re in full control of things and you won’t “leak” visitor data to service providers.