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It would be real creepy if someone does the same thing for Whatsapp, you can even predict who's talking to each other much better than Facebook. It's a bit harder to collect data from web.whatsapp.com because it's using Websockets but let me know if someone develop such tool and publish it on Github. :)
Awesome and hilarious article. Id just like to note `for (;;);` is not to prevent users from using bad JSON parsers like `eval` but prevent older browsers with little to no cross domain policy from loading it with a script tag and doing evil XSS by overriding Array or Object constructors or prototypes to pull that data
>Similarly, I’m not sure why there are these weird spikes every three minutes (+- ~1minute) sometimes. Could these just be keep-alive requests? For example, the mobile app checks whether it's still connected?
Good point! I didn't think of that. 3 minutes does seem like the kind of time an engineer would code into their app. So does that mean that the spiky periods are times when people are online the whole time?
> If you reload the page you’ll see approximately fifty-bajillion network requests go off as Facebook desperately tries to load all the junk that it needs to display facebook.com. I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. I mean Facebook loads decently enou…
So no matter how many connections are made when visiting facebook, it usually loads fairly fast because of aggressive caching and progressive connections. Most of the time the end user shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
> If you reload the page you’ll see approximately fifty-bajillion network requests go off as Facebook desperately tries to load all the junk that it needs to display facebook.com. I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. I mean Facebook loads decently enou…
> I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. Have you considered that your opinion on the best way to serve data to a billion users might actually be wrong? That maybe Facebook actually knows what they are doing?
Not really surprising, from what I’ve heard from friends about their cowboy-style internal engineering culture, and spaghetti piled on spaghetti internal code organization, where shipping new features ASAP is privileged above all other goals.
When you have endless money to throw engineers and servers at a problem, it’s possible to kinda sorta paper over a lot of horrible broken design. Not sure whether that implies anything one way or another about whether or not they “know what they are doing”.
It sort of depends on your definition of “know”. After all, their motto is “move fast and break things.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you considered that your opinion on the best way to serve data to a billion users might actually be wrong? That maybe Facebook actually knows what they are doing? Certainly! But I've also done work where Humvees in the middle of Iraq use satellite internet connectivity with massive latency and the more connections it has to open to get started the slower everything gets. Perhaps this is an advantage where late…
Lets get rid of the notion that Facebook doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.
> If you reload the page you’ll see approximately fifty-bajillion network requests go off as Facebook desperately tries to load all the junk that it needs to display facebook.com. I like this part. As a developer I've often looked at the network usage of large websites / web applications and it's always surprising to me just how...unoptimized it is as far as network connections go. I mean Facebook loads decently enou…
Progressive rendering and lots of small network requests can be good if the user feels its faster. I suspect their mobile apps are more conservative about using fewer requests (and probably a binary protocol).