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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

#421

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

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…

It’s karma mining. It’s the same people who think frameworks are dumb and that JS is a terrible language and that codes of conduct are controversial and that you can build FB in a weekend with, at most, ten engineers

I really have no clue what they do for a living

Anyone who was working in the jQuery days knows exactly why the whole industry moved toward SPAs. It’s disingenuous to say it was just a millennial whim and didn’t fix any problems. It’s a ridiculous argument but everyone’s scared of downvotes

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

#422

Post by fouc »

aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

Perhaps we should split the web into two worlds. Create dedicated browsers for just enriched document etc. Add some sort of constraints on what the browser can do, and how much control is removed from the user.

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

#423

Post by TooCleverByHalf »

sgustard wrote: post #419
aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

Well I certainly want Google Maps to act like an app (which it does): panning, zooming and so on. And I'm happy for Hacker News to act like a traditional website. At that point it's a false dichotomy: different solutions for different problems, yes? As an analogy: some pop-up books are amazing works of art. But reading would be frustrating if every book was a pop-up book.

On one hand I appreciate how elaborately the parent comment made their point. On another, I appreciate how succinctly you made your point. A conundrum within a conundrum, indeed.

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

#424

Post by TooCleverByHalf »

fouc wrote: post #422
aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

Perhaps we should split the web into two worlds. Create dedicated browsers for just enriched document etc. Add some sort of constraints on what the browser can do, and how much control is removed from the user.

The problem here is that the average end user would not know which one to use and when to use it.

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

#425

Post by phponpcp »

k__ wrote: post #414
aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

No, the problem isn't that the new FB acts like an app, the problem is that it's clunky as hell. It's like a bad copy of "the new Twitter" and even Twitter isn't really good. The only end-user software from FB is Messenger Lite. It's quick and does what I expect it to do. Even the voice chat is good and I didn't expect a lite version of a messenger to have it.

Is the new FB even live yet?

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

#426

Post by jonny383 »

I hope this speeds things up for Facebook. On the rare occasions I use it these days to check up on family photos or something, the entire site is fucking painfully slow. Even on my quad core I7 desktop on a fibre backbone connection, I'm routinely waiting 10+ seconds each time I click on the "notification" icon (or any other action).

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

#427

Post by 3PS »

dhimes wrote: post #153
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…

Are you using desktop of phone? I've found the desktop quite slow lately- I thought it was probably due to high usage.

Desktop, for Facebook. I've tried to avoid installing their phone apps for privacy reasons.

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

#428

Post by 3PS »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #192
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…

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

I'm using a 1st gen Surface Book 1. Dual core, 6th gen i7. Not an awful computer but not a monster either. Seeing the other responses in this thread, I think it may have to do more with network bandwidth.

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

#429

Post by Apocryphon »

saagarjha wrote: post #332
plorkyeran wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root cause of the problem is that they have too many people working on it, and that's obviously not a problem you can hire your way out of.

Perhaps they should hire engineers who have the explicit job of ripping out things that should not belong.

Or if they must insist on writing more code than refactoring it out, perhaps they should build more products.

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

#430

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

sgustard wrote: post #419
aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

Well I certainly want Google Maps to act like an app (which it does): panning, zooming and so on. And I'm happy for Hacker News to act like a traditional website. At that point it's a false dichotomy: different solutions for different problems, yes? As an analogy: some pop-up books are amazing works of art. But reading would be frustrating if every book was a pop-up book.

Things that act like apps also can’t be adequately prevented from compromising the general data privacy of the population. What this means is that it doesn’t matter very much whether your or I have mere preferences for something to have rich app-like functionality or not. Our wanting of it does not play a role unless it can be made verifiably secure and not abusive of user privacy rights. So far, general web applications cannot be made verifiably non-abusive of users’ data privacy, so we must only focus on websites as purely structured documents with no app-like capability.

I sure wish companies wouldn’t abuse data privacy so we could instead care about user preferences for app-like functionality, but we don’t yet live in a world like that.

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