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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

#121

Post by freepor »

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…

Facebook isn’t trying to maximize your enjoyment, they’re trying to maximize their profits. By that measure they are doing vastly better than 12 years ago.

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

#122

Post by 3PS »

I'm actually really surprised by the number of comments in this thread about how the new redesign is slower. I've had it since yesterday and it genuinely feels much faster and more responsive than the old Facebook UI - though, to be fair, that's not a huge accomplishment give that the old UI would take forever to finish painting or respond to input. I'd consider it a success, especially when compared to the disaster that was and continues to be Reddit's redesign.

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

#123

Post by speedgoose »

schkkd wrote: post #64
pier25 wrote: 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.

That's pretty much size of a mobile app. But the thing with web apps is that they are downloaded every time and hence the outcry.

They aren't though. You have a cache.

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

#124

Post by aboringusername »

For me, I consider the real test for a website's performance to be how it reacts under JS disabled conditions. Using NoScript has completely changed the way I use the internet. Combine that with DoH and filtering and you can remove a large part of the jank that fills browsers needlessly.

It's a delicate balancing act, but it puts you in control. Sometimes it's just not worth the hassle, and I suspect it's why you see many comments like "just read the f* article", except sites are so slow and cause so much rendering and CPU cycles it's just an abuse of the platform.

Websites are capable of serving text without JS being required.

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

#126

Post by frou_dh »

dgellow wrote: post #78
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?

The repos have some activity, but it looks bad that the most recent post on the official blog was in August 2018.

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

#127

Post by Drip33 »

scalableUnicon wrote: post #76

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.

>Similarly i.reddit.com

Try https://old.reddit.com

It's so bad that people made Browser Extensions for Firefox[0] and Chrome[1]

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

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

#128

Post by snazz »

benbristow wrote: post #96
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…

Twitter's new design is pretty fast. Sure, it does a lot less than Facebook but it's using similar modern SPA tech. Facebook is still pretty slow even on a Ryzen 3900x with 32GB of 3600mhz RAM. It's a lot better than it used to be though.

Yeah, I think that Twitter did a pretty good job. After the initial load, it even works offline, so the actual API calls are the only thing that it's fetching over the network.

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

#129

Post by OkGoDoIt »

SN76477 wrote: post #111
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…

I wish they would just give us APIs and let us build our own experience.

But then how would they force us to look at ads? How would they keep all their valuable data locked in their walled garden? Sadly I don’t think we’re ever going back to the glory days of open APIs.

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

#130

Post by buboard »

bzb3 wrote: post #65
edhelas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way. Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.

There is absolutely no excuse. The app is not doing protein folding, its merely showing text!

Surprise, many many ppl use facebook in crap laptops, fb is popular with everyone.

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