Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by troughway » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

lancesells wrote: post #45

notyourwork wrote: post #32

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.

Twitter and the new Reddit aren't in the same category. Twitter is still somewhat usable.

Reddit, on the other hand, is an absolute clusterfuck from layout and usability perspective. The choices made were not made for monetary gain, they are simply really bad design choices that for one reason or another have not been fixed.

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

#72

Post by girishso » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #58

lancesells wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

Agreed. SPAs only make sense for few websites like Trello, for most other websites plain dynamic HTML with dash of ajax here and there are much better.

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

#73

Post by atestu » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #11

ajayyy wrote: post #2

It looks a lot like the new Twitter. I guess the new trend is just to show multiple tabs from the mobile app at once as the desktop site.

it is yahoo from the 90s https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/... Nothing new under the sun

That's their redesign from 2006

https://techcrunch.com/2006/07/17/new-yahoo-home-page-goes-l...

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

#74

Post by bryanmgreen » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

I wonder what the Mobile App versus Mobile Browser versus Desktop Browser usage percentages look like.

Generally speaking, how important is it to actually update the desktop version other than for the sake of updating tech? I only use desktop as part of my marketing work, if I do it use it at all.

(Side Note: I can't believe it took this long for Dark Mode to be a normal option for all software)

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

#75

Post by Groxx » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

>We addressed this by generating atomic CSS at build time. Atomic CSS has a logarithmic growth curve because it’s proportional to the number of unique style declarations rather than to the number of styles and features we write.

I've always wondered... has anyone checked to see if this strategy of CSS (which AFAICT is slowly growing in popularity, since it's a super simple minification trick) ends up costing more in bandwidth?

It seems like it would, because 1) you frequently need multiple classes per html element, and 2) those html classes need to be sent on every page load, where CSS caches well if used "normally". I can see it being smaller on any individual page, especially with class-name minifying, but across many? And infinite scrolling loading many more elements?

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

#76

Post by scalableUnicon » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

I rarely use Facebook, but when I do I use https://m.facebook.com instead of the main site. Similarly i.reddit.com and the HTML version of Gmail. Which aren't great looking, but pretty usable. I hope these versions will be maintained for a long time.

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

#77

Post by ngngngng » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

raphaelj wrote: post #19

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…

It really is appalling. I'm on a top of the line laptop with Gigabit internet and I can't do anything on Facebook without waiting several seconds for loading. Usually I only open it to check notifications. I just refreshed and counted and it took 9 seconds for the page to load and to show my notifications.

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

#78

Post by dgellow » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

vosper wrote: post #25

I saw no mention of Reason or ReasonReact. I thought they rewrote Messenger in Reason, and so I figured facebook.com would be next. Did Reason fall out of favor or something?

Was Reason ever more than an experiment?

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

#79

Post by pathartl » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

neogodless wrote: post #63

pathartl wrote: post #3

Great write up. Glad to see they're making some changes as the current interface still feels like 2005 with the main feed at 500px wide. And as always, dark mode is welcome. I really hope this helps performance on the site. In the past year or so I've been noticing that when the page sits in an unfocused tab for a while, clicking back usually takes 20+ seconds to actually load and I'm stuck at a white screen. It actu…

About every 3 minutes I went a little mad with the new interface. With the old one, photos open, and you can click almost anywhere to close them. With the new (desktop) interface, you have to find the X to close the photo. No, no, not the X you find on the top right of every other interface ever. This time it's on the top left!

You mean they didn't just use Fancybox like everyone else? /s

But yeah, that's annoying. We've had lightboxes for like 15 years now and people still can't get it right.

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

#80

Post by revscat » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

Kaze404 wrote: post #56

edhelas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hA79vKE_E