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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

#291
post #131
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.

Come on man, real programmers use assembly and roll their own browsers.

Assembly is a needless abstraction. Real programmers create binaries with xxd.

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

#292
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…

Let’s go on this tangent, why is Reddit’s frontend so sluggish and lacking quality of life improvements that should be in place by now? Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back?

> Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back?

Facebook Engineering has a notorious "not invented by me" culture, it's not unique there but a lot of our "world-class" engineers are just acting economically rationally and hole-digging on some new bespoke framework or tool to cement their position in the company. You end up with a massive amount of churn and over-engineered vanity projects, and it's manifesting downstream in basically every product we've turned out for the last five years. That's why the applications bloated and terrible.

The joke inside the company is that it used to be "move fast and break things" but now it's "breakfast, vest and move things around". It's really an engineering culture of decadence and waste these days.

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

#293
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…

Across mobile messenger, messenger.com and the messenger desktop app, the website was the only place left where you could have multiple chats open at once. Now that moves to one at a time as well. That is a huge usability regression (unless its been fixed since last time I tried the prerelease. Edit: Just switched back, it does look like they maintained chat windows at the bottom instead of just chatheads on desktop, although I can still only have two chats open at once.) Friend lists also got left with the legacy interface, which cant bode well for them in the long run. They are still facebooks most squandered opportunity.

The neverending quest to reduce information density is a usability disaster, despite the misheld belief that cleanliness = usable. Zooming out on the new fb interface, to restore some information density, leaves a comical amount of whitespace. Wells Fargo has turned its desktop interface into a giant stretched mobile app. Nothing is hyperlinks that support right click or new tab anymore.

https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-inte...

The cluster f of the old old facebook interface was beautiful.

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

#294
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on man, real programmers use assembly and roll their own browsers.

Assembly is a needless abstraction. Real programmers create binaries with xxd.

Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

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

#295
post #80
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why is it downvote ? This link just show you can create a basic twitter like application in 10 minutes with the right tool. Imagine how many hours/days it would take with any JavaScript framework !

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I really don't want a video to autoplay on the side of the screen when I'm reading some news article, for example. It was so much better before when there just were less ways of doing what the website wanted and more ways of doing what you wanted with your browser and your computing power.

Sure, it's totally reasonable for somebody to dislike these features. I just object to the claims that it doesn't do anything substantially different than what it did 10 years ago.

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

#297
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…

Try it with a normal computer for normal people, not with your monstrous 'developer machine'.

Just tried it on my 2012 $1k laptop. 2s for full page load; about 1s to load up a chat, about 1s to open a friend's profile.

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

#298
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why is it downvote ? This link just show you can create a basic twitter like application in 10 minutes with the right tool. Imagine how many hours/days it would take with any JavaScript framework !

Probably because a Twitter close isn't even close to a complex application. You can build one in React/Vue just as fast as you would without them.

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

#299

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 wonder if they fixed the bug where if you visit the site with Safari on an iPad, when you try to type a comment, every space becomes two spaces. Also, I wonder if paste (command-v) is also randomly blocked at times.

I use mbasic.facebook.com as much as possible. Occasionally I'll use m.facebook.com. I've had the mobile apps uninstalled for ages.

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

#300
post #90

The most irritating "feature" of Facebook is they insert themselves like eight deep in the history when opening their page so the back button doesn't work.

This kind of thing is normally the domain of sites you find after searching “office 365 warez”. Pretty bad.
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