Choosing performance
What I find interesting is the emphasis on speed. There are a few interesting interactive features, but speed is the selling point here. Facebook is pushing it very, very hard. “Fast” is scattered throughout their information about Instant Articles, and emphasized very heavily in the promotional video.
There was a bit of a storm around the announcement from Facebook about “Instant Articles” (http://instantarticles.fb.com/). The main reason for FB to move in this direction is directly related to speed. They quote it takes an average of 8 seconds for web articles to load. To be fair, their probably right a lot of the time.
In this article Tim Kadlec looks at Facebooks approach and why they’re doing this, and he’s right that performance is an issue but it’s because we’ve made it that way. Scott Jehl has already showed us how to reduce load time on news sites by more than 8 seconds without even touching the loading assets (http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/weight-wait.html)
An excerpt from Choosing performance
