At Fastr, we pride ourselves on the rapid cadence of our innovation — we want to share exciting new updates weekly. But sometimes, we're working on major, transformative changes that we can't yet document here because we're in the early stages of a phased rollout.
Such is the story with our Shake It Off release (yes, we're all Swifties). Over the past two months, we've been preparing it to headline the show. This platform upgrade is designed to be completely transparent to you and your shoppers. Going live with Shake It Off should be as simple as publishing an experience. Visiting a Shake It Off page will be functionally identical to a legacy page—just faster and better in every way.
To make this work, we needed to change everything (and we do mean everything) that happens between clicking publish and your pixels hitting the screen. It's like weaving an invisible string between your content and your audience. A release that feels effortless while involving the maximum possible amount of change. Just pity the poor QA team involved in that.
What Changed This Week?
Our Fastr Performance Updates summarize the key features of Shake It Off, but let's focus on two core changes:
- WYSIWYG: We no longer have a "viewer" running on your site, converting what you created in Canvas to what a user sees on screen.
- Performance: We've reduced the overall JavaScript footprint of our content on sites by over 90%.
Achieving both is an unalloyed good. Who wants slow load times or non-WYSIWYG experiences? But there's a reason no one has accomplished this yet: device compatibility.
Since the dawn of the modern web, JavaScript has been the crutch allowing developers to deliver content across a range of devices with different capabilities. While it's not truly WYSIWYG if some gross pile of React.js is sitting between your design and the screen, that code was doing some real heavy lifting to make all devices look at least okay-ish.
Until now, no one has been daring—or perhaps foolhardy—enough to make unlimited WYSIWYG content creation work across all devices (looking at you, iOS) without heavy JavaScript frameworks. There were a lot of false starts, dead ends, leads to chase. That led to a whole lot of incremental releases along the way, but nothing we could announce here. It was our off-Broadway work — the behind-the-scenes efforts to make the final performance look effortless.
With our September 26 release, we're there. Welcome to the Shake It Off Era. Pure WYSIWYG. Every device. No code overhead.
So, yeah, JavaScript, we're never ever ever getting back together. And Safari, we knew you were trouble when you walked in, but we've found a way to make it work.
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