Facebook folded to the "quit changing the UI" crowd years ago when they opened registration up beyond colleges.
Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
141–150 of 489 posts
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#142> 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…
we use this approach since more than a year with very good results. Regarding the data transfer it is not much of a problem because those classes usually get repeated a lot across the elements and having lot of repeated string is the best case scenario for gzip compression leading to basically no size impact.
https://github.com/utilitycss/atomic This is the framework we developed to create atomic CSS component libraries if you want to have a look (documentation needs some love, but is quite stable)
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#143Earlier 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…
It has 96 .js scripts on a single page.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#144Quite 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 can't decide whether I love or hate the UX of this new stack. It certainly feels more like an app now than a website. I like the new basic layout, "app shell" or tier 1 rendering. It feels like the First Contentful Paint is improved and some random layout shifts have eliminated. It might take a couple of seconds more to load something but it appears where you expect it to appear.
On the other hand, navigation and clicking around is still sooo slow. My 60-year-old aunt called me and asked if she needs a new pc because facebook makes her laptop fans spin like crazy. I couldn't explain to her about all this react-redux-graphql thing and frankly, she doesn't care. All she cares is that facebook is slow and all she does is post photos and talk with friends like she did 10 years ago.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#145Quite 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 don't use Facebook but how do you know it's not BE calls that are creating the slow experience? It sounds like they rewrote the FE not the entire system.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#146For 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…
With increasing adoption of reCaptcha v3 which won't let you browse on any page without Javascript, it will become harder and harder to use the internet with NoScript enabled.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#147Quite 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 still don't understand how the biggest websites get away with being so unbelievably bloated. My guess is that most people have medium to old phones and PCs that are bogged down with nonsense running in the background and facebook, instagram, twitter etc. run extra slow, but I guess people just put up with it.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Aah, the Reddit redesign. I still can't use it. I check up on it once in a while, but my 7 year old MacBook Pro still don't like it. It remains slow, regardless of the number of times Reddit claims of have improved the speed.
On the phone it's even worse, a large number of subreddit now require that you use the app... unless you just go to old.reddit.com.
The point of the reddit redesign still alludes me. Sure the old design isn't mobile friendly, so I can understand that they would want to fix that. Then again they mainly use the redesign to push the app. And the new design isn't that mobile friendly anyway. Certainly not if you value battery life. Comments are now also hidden by default, which is just weird. But you have infinite scroll, which seems to be the main selling point. I'm not sure I needed that though.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#149Quite 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 was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago We'll see what the data show. I have been reading comments about Facebook's supposed decline for as long as I've been aware of Facebook and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...
[deleted]
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they probably could build a nice and fast website if it was up to them. But there's probably a lot more requirements than just that. Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. This is probably the case for a lot of other decisions that slow down the page ("We…
>Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... . are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. I've always suspected that the Div-itis plaguing fb's website is a result of React's dependence on the 𝚘̶𝚟̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚞̶𝚜̶𝚎̶ misuse of higher order components.
React components aren't a 1:1 mapping to the DOM, so you could in theory have 50 HoCs wrapping a single component and it still only output one div or whatever.
Also, HoCs have somewhat fallen out of favour over time, with hooks and the child as a function/render prop style becoming more popular. I think the only HoC I consistently use these days is `connect` from `react-redux`.