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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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frontier of web design is apparently digital Rube Goldberg machines, existing probably more for job security rather than consideration for the end-user.

The all-but defacto use of javascript transpilers especially invokes the image of 'Rube Goldberg' machines.

When you don’t use transpilers, you have to write ES5 code. No-one wants that.

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

#232

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 haven’t tested but I doubt the problem is with the CSS, is it?

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

#233

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…

Looking at the internet today, I think we need to lower our expectations and be realistic. At least in the US.

We are still driving 60mph on freeways and what trains we have do not travel at 300kph.

Perhaps many of us flipped out when we only had 9600 baud modems, but you could get up, brew some tea, walk the dog, or read a book while waiting for a page to load. We all had so much more patience back then.

Why do we need instant gratification with FB and other social media? Maybe, or maybe not /s.

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

#234
post #58

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…

Thank you for this post. I yell at my screen each time I have to use leboncoin.

It was super ugly, but it did the job. Now it's super ugly, but it steals my focus at every opportunity, refreshes parts of the UI I'm about to click, or has select inputs that love to play hide and seek with my cursor. It's a UX nightmare.

I must say their new payment system is nice. But boy do we have to suffer when looking for something to buy now.

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

#235

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'm not sure what your setup is, but 8 seconds to load a profile is not my experience. It takes less than a second here.

This is an anecdotal datapoint that is insanely useless in the real world, but the fact that it is the top comment is typical of this site.

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

#236

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…

I've tried several times to get used to NoScript, but there's just too much friction in day-to-day usage. I already get regular breakage due to agressive uBlock configuration.

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

#237
post #40

Earlier 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…

They already did: https://mbasic.facebook.com .

For me on FF this is only a tiny bit faster to load the main page, but way less readable and pictures are so small you have to open them to be able to see what's in there. So not a net positive result imo.

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

#238

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.

I sort of tolerated New Reddit at first, until I experienced first hand their (to the user) cynical reasons for doing it. Namely: throwing mobile app prompts in your face, blocking some reddits unless you're logged in, inserting ads masquerading as proper posts...

Even then, I could cope with some of it, except that they just totally broke the experience with shitty infinite scrolling. You can't click a damn thing and hope to go back to where you left on a post. Sometimes even old.reddit.com will redirect you to the new version now.

These redesigns would suck less if they were more about being functional and not about scraping every last morsel of engagement from unwitting visitors, through whichever devious methods they can imagine.

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

#239

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.

I'm curious what your response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff was? Open APIs to build your own experience are like 100 times worse than that, at least the APIs that CA used were limited (such that they didn't provide enough info to actually recreate FB) and required CA to sign a developer agreement with FB to restrict how they could be used.
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