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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#51
post #12

> as little as possible I just opened FB with the cache disabled and it downloaded 5.85MB (19.76MB uncompressed). Most of it happens after the page has rendered, which is great, but that's a lot of stuff. There are 13.74MB of uncompressed JavaScript.

Stealing data about the users as accurately as possible requires more code than one would think.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#52
post #12

> as little as possible I just opened FB with the cache disabled and it downloaded 5.85MB (19.76MB uncompressed). Most of it happens after the page has rendered, which is great, but that's a lot of stuff. There are 13.74MB of uncompressed JavaScript.

With a standard 4G/FTTH connection that's less than one second of download time.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#53

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

I agree, React/Angular front ends always seem slow and clunky to me.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.

better experience for who? For the developer it's a way better experience. For the consumer it often isn't because of inefficient bloat, but if effort is put into packaging it sensibly it can be better thanks to build pipelines/optimizations. In my experience, there's a lot of apps that would have never gotten written in the first place without the boost from React/Angular/etc. It simply takes way longer (which means also more expensive) to use "pure javascript and ajax."

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#55

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

It's Facebook's own standard: "We knew we wanted Facebook.com to start up fast, respond fast, and provide a highly interactive experience.". The person you're responding to is saying they haven't met their own metrics for success based on their experience. You can't really attribute this "preference" solely to them.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.

What makes you think React/Angular are products to increase user experience? Of course you won't find that, they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier. Have you worked on a platform that uses nothing but pure JS and fetch calls? I have, and there's no way to make sense of a project that has to deal with so many things.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#57

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

> If one needs 2MB of CSS for such a website

The 2MB was for the old site. The new site loads 20% or 400KB.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree whole heartedly, Facebook is a disgrace of a website and has been for years. Crazy how slow it is to load.

I think you could add Twitter and New Reddit to the list as well.

In France we have a Craiglist-like website. They recently moved to ReactJS : https://www.leboncoin.fr/

The website features didn't changed in between. It's basically a pagination + a search based on radius (so DB related) + name (so DB related) + categories (so DB related).

The complete website could be build in pure HTML + CSS and a bit of JS + Ajax to refresh parts of it.

But no, it's build with ReactJS, and it takes seconds to search a simple item on it.

To compare, just try the same search on the Dutch equivalent, MarktPlaats, https://www.marktplaats.nl/. The experience is way snappier, way lighter, the features are the same, and it's just HTML + CSS + a bit of JS.

We made a mistake with React/Vue/Angular. And we should really go back and stop using those frameworks.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#59

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Really? I really like it. I almost solely use Facebook to organise blood bowl matches, so it’s a lot of group chats and events, and it’s so much better than the old design.

I haven’t noticed it being slower either, it’s certainly not fast, but it’s not really something I notice either.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#60
post #52
post #12

> as little as possible I just opened FB with the cache disabled and it downloaded 5.85MB (19.76MB uncompressed). Most of it happens after the page has rendered, which is great, but that's a lot of stuff. There are 13.74MB of uncompressed JavaScript.

With a standard 4G/FTTH connection that's less than one second of download time.

Everyone have 4G and Fiber, and a Core i7 and 16Gb of RAM :) Seriously…
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