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I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old less-AJAXy versions on a really slow internet connection with a bit of packet loss


And it is funny - AJAX-related technologies were promoted exactly to make sites more lightweight and more responsive..


You could argue that Twitter is more responsive than it would be using server-generated HTML pages. But the initial app download is much bigger than it would be with that method.


What Twitter seem blissfully unaware of is that they've traded download speed for rendering speed on lower end devices.


if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com


You can also play user-agent games to get the Android version in your browser. I prefer the regular mobile edition, but it's interesting to poke around; I've found three separate versions of the site just by faking out my user agent.


I used to use that all the time. It's essentially old twitter with a layout that is a little less wide.




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