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

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

#211

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

benbristow wrote: post #179

Drip33 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Old Reddit is so damn ugly though apart from the Subreddits which have nice custom themes (although does make for a 00's Myspace-like inconsistent interface) The new Reddit definitely seems a lot faster nowadays than it did when it first launched.

> The new Reddit definitely seems a lot faster nowadays than it did when it first launched.

For me it's not the speed, it's the number of times the page straight up just doesn't refresh, or comes back with no data. Very frustrating.

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

#212

Post by elboru » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

3PS wrote: post #122

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…

I guess it's optimized for some computers/networks but not for others. Right now I'm in an area without optical fiber so I have to use a 4g modem (12 MBps), I have an old 2013 MacBook Pro and even though my setup is far from being fast, I have no problems with most web pages, some few load kinda slow, but Facebook is in a different category, it's totally unusable, some stuff never even get to load. If I want to check Facebook I have to use Safari (the new theme is not supported in Safari yet).

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

#213

Post by dbbk » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #100

shp0ngle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get the hate for the new Twitter, to be honest. It loads fast, is simple, it’s to the point.

It's slow, requires JS, and fails around.. 50% of loads, I think?

It obviously does not fail on half of loads.

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

#214

Post by kall » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

janpot wrote: post #86

I don't really care about their end result because I don't use facebook. But in spite of all the negative comments here, I'm actually interested in how their styling solution works.

If I had to guess, I would expect it to be similar to react-native-web. They say the api is inspired by RN (StyleSheet.create) and the atomic classes look similar to what react-native-web produces. Also the author of RNW works at facebook.

It‘s called xstyle and you can see some examples in a talk from last year that presented the new tech for new faceook. I will update if I find the link (can‘t right now).

Edit: starts at about 28:00 here, but the rest about react+relay data fetching is interesting as well if you care about that stuff https://developers.facebook.com/videos/2019/building-the-new...

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

#215

Post by xd1936 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #176

dylkil wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stealing data about the users its not stealing when the users agreed to it

Using a website does not imply informed consent.

No, but signing up for an account and agreeing to the Terms of Service does. The not-logged-into homepage is 1.3mb. Still not tiny, but definitely not the same as the web app.

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

#216

Post by jdavis703 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #118

freedomben wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For a certain kind of developer who drinks a certain kind of Kool-Aid, sure. Personally I am a lot less productive when I’m forced to work on a React codebase. It’s kind of like using an ORM, it can feel like it makes things easier, but really you end up fighting with the abstraction more than if you had just learned the underlying technology itself.

The thing is, every place I've worked that was against ORMs or frontend frameworks wound up evolving their own half-documented, half working framework. I find it's easier to spend as much time learning the abstraction as the underlying technology, and then that knowledge can be ported from system to system.

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

#217

Post by badfrog » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #20

gfodor wrote: post #4

This is 100% incidental complexity. It's painful to consider that this level of sophisticated engineering is needed to render a website quickly in 2020. What went wrong? I'm personally excited about things like turbolinks and phoenix liveview, which may provide a path out of this mess.

Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then, in terms of actual improvement to end user experience, to make it so slow this kind of crap is needed? My guess is: - Desire to offload more processing to end user machines to save compute - More and more ads and user analytics in order to pick which ads to show - More engineers that irrationally hate the simplicity of PHP Duct tape on top o…

> Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then

It does way more things. In particular, there are a lot more interactive experiences. A decade ago, it just loaded a web page and nothing changed until you refreshed. Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

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

#218

Post by mister_hn » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:26 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…

There's too much CSS and JS because of web components and too many teams.

* team for web component A => CSS, JS

* Team for web component B => CSS, JS

And so on with 1000+ components,

Ends up to be a big pile of mud and everything maybe duplicated, just got a different name and failed to be optimised away and removed.

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

#219

Post by badfrog » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

lookdangerous wrote: post #161

core-questions wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then, in terms of actual improvement to end user experience, to make it so slow this kind of crap is needed? My guess is: - Desire to offload more processing to end user machines to save compute - More and more ads and user analytics in order to pick which ads to show - More engineers that irrationally hate the simplicity of PHP Duct tape on top o…

'Desire to offload more processing to end user machines to save compute' strikes me as a real possibility

I think this is very unlikely. Making the page load one second faster pays Facebook more in terms of user retention and engagement than it costs them in server usage.

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

#220

Post by crazygringo » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:28 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…

For me the performance seems better. It also seems strange that if one of their two main publicly stated goals was to increase performance (the other goal being ease of maintenance), that it would slow down. Maybe you have extensions interfering?

Also, the set and scale of features in the Facebook app makes it literally one of the most complex webapps out there. It's far more than just multimedia posts+messaging -- it's a marketplace, dating, games, apps, groups, pages, and more. Nobody's "failing". And the 2MB of CSS was the "before" uncompressed. The "before" compressed was 400 KB, and this update appears to reduce it to under 80KB compressed. That's 96% less than the 2MB you're complaining about, more than an entire order of magnitude.

So Facebook seems to be improving here, no? I fail to see what is a "total failure" or "clearly a problem".