The page is now half a second faster

Nov 12, 2009 14:50 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo has been rather quiet lately, but things are moving forward and the developers are still focusing on making good on Yahoo's latest strategy to center the experience around a few core services. The customizable My Yahoo homepage is an important component of that and Yahoo has been working on it to get load times down, but also changed the way some of the apps work.

“The leaves’ color transforms to an autumn palette as the brisk cool breeze sweeps through Silicon Valley… change is in the air and My Yahoo! is no exception. Below are some recent changes on My Yahoo!… and yes, preview on the Mail Preview app is back!,” Yahoo announced the changes.

The biggest new feature isn't exactly a feature at all. Yahoo has been tinkering with the page, trying to speed it up and My Yahoo now loads half a second faster. That doesn't seem like much, but it can make a huge difference. Improvements in page load speeds are usually measured in the milliseconds and the fact that Yahoo managed to make such a big difference means that either the page was poorly written before or, more likely, that Yahoo engineers really know their stuff. In fact, Yahoo says that the change saves users a combined 300,000 minutes every day thanks to the huge traffic numbers of the page.

Apart from the speed increase, Yahoo also introduced a new comics App that you can install on your homepage with more than a few comics to choose from. Arguably one of the most popular items, the Yahoo Mail app has been redesigned to look similar to the one on the Yahoo homepage, which introduced its version of apps a few months ago as well.

In addition, the app got updated based on user feedback bringing back the preview feature which allowed users to view the emails they've received. Moreover, the Weather app was updated to make it work together with all the similar tools on Yahoo so that multiple locations, saved across any site, will be saved in a single place and be available to all services. Other apps got a number of bug fixes and small changes.