Riot.im Web 0.17 and iOS 0.7.6 — Smaller Footprint 👣, Faster Launch 🚀
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Riot.im Web 0.17, landing a dramatically improved launch time and a ~70% reduction in memory use on Web!
iOS users will already see the speedup (since 0.7.6 which landed October 5); for Riot.im web/desktop users we’ll be turning the feature on gradually over the next week — you’ll see a notification next time you start the app, when the speedup has activated.
Just how fast is it?
The best way to see the speedup is to experience it yourself, but to illustrate, here’s an animated GIF of Riot.im 0.16.6 and 0.17, racing to load the collosal test account, davetest:
And of course, Riot Fans who preview new releases on https://riot.im/staging or track the bleeding edge of development on https://riot.im/develop have already noticed the speedup:
How have you achieved this marvel?
We’ve actually made Riot.im faster and lighter by making it… lazier. Instead of loading the details of every single user in every room when you join, Riot.im now only loads the bare minimum required to get started, pulling in the rest as and when it’s needed (a technique known as lazy loading).
When’s it coming to Android?
Development is underway — watch this space!
What else has been going on?
Riot.im Web Development Environment Improvements
In Riot.im Web we’ve streamlined the development environment setup process to make it easy for anybody to get started developing on Riot Web.
If you’ve ever wanted to fix/improve/build on top of Riot.im Web/Electron head over to https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web#setting-up-a-dev-environment for the comprehensive instructions!
What’s Next?
With performance work behind us for the time being, the next few months will see us working on three main streams:
- finishing the Riot.im redesign
- radical end-to-end encryption UX improvements
- blitzing the “First Impressions” buglist — a ‘short’list of ~70 bugs we’re tackling to provide a smoother experience for brand new users
As always you can check out the full Riot/Web and matrix-react-sdk changelogs for the gory details, and thank you for your support! Keep that feedback coming (#riot:matrix.org/github)!
