Why does Twitter use a hashbang instead of using the History API?
19th February 2012
My answer to Why does Twitter use a hashbang instead of using the History API? on Quora
I asked a friend who is an engineer there about this a while ago. When they shipped the first version of Twitter that used fully Ajax driven pages there was a critical bug with pushState in a widely deployed version of Safari, which made it impractical to commit to.
More recent articles
- Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer - 20th October 2026
- Hello Python 3.15, goodbye 3.10, and now I can use 3.11 - 12th October 2026
- A new feature for my blog, built using my voice - 9th October 2026
- Claude Haiku 5.5 - 7th October 2026