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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

#481

Post by kecupochren »

TooCleverByHalf wrote: post #423
sgustard wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN in a nutshell

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

#482

Post by neop1x »

datasage wrote: post #93
Kaze404 wrote: 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.

Anytime you need to stream data to or from a client, like audio/video or data. Single page apps have a much better experience. From an architecture standpoint, it does also allow a much simpler separation of concerns. That said, it does it get used more often that it should and can take more time to build than a multi-page app.

Google Cloud Console felt slow to me too. And the user experience could sometimes be better too. For example: I set filters in a table of items, clicked many times to Next to paginate on the 10th page. Then I accidentally clicked on an item on the page, detail page shows. Clicking browser' Back button takes me back but the filter is cleared and I am on the page #1 again. State was not persisted so I could start filtering and paginating again. I am not 100% sure but I think it was the Quota listing. The old, document-style pages used to hold state!

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

#483

Post by neop1x »

edhelas wrote: post #58
lancesells wrote: post #45

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…

They made the same with local Czech eBay-like website https://www.aukro.cz/ . Previously it was a fast website. Transition to the webapp was painful, their filtering component was not working properly on mobile. It still takes several seconds until the initial white page switches to the rendered DOM. They lost many customers due to this painful transition. I think they fixed some of the problems (I know filtering component works ok now) but I basically stopped using it since that transition too.

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

#484

Post by benbristow »

thelean12 wrote: post #352
ccmcarey wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think old reddit is ugly, though it takes some getting used to. Combined with RES for some minor enhancements (navigation etc) and it's great. It's similar to HN. Not fantastic design, but incredible information density and usability.

Incredible? HN has horrific usability. Good luck knowing when people respond to your comments. Searching takes you to a completely different website. You can't delete comments (which should be a basic privacy ask from this crowd). Click targets are incredibly small. It took years of begging for them to even implement collapsing comments. And for some reason they put it on the right side (not lined up with the tree le…

HN could definitely do with a redesign. Just seems like stubbornness from the owners not to change it.

I'm not talking turning it into an SPA or adding tons of JavaScript, just a bit of CSS/HTML TLC with some nicer fonts and make the whole thing a bit more scalable and bigger with some UX tweaks.

Something akin to http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/

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

#485

Post by LadyCailin »

ianmobbs wrote: post #340
AlexandrB wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. Informed consent is not the same as shoving a ToS/EULA in front of someone who may not have the legal or technological education to understand it or its consequences. From the Wikipedia definition[1] of informed consent (in medicine): > An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and consequences of an action. Adequate…

Fortunately, Facebooks ToS[0] is not full of legalese or jargon, and I'm sure anybody with enough technological education to sign up for Facebook can understand it too. [0] https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Huh. Sex offenders aren’t allowed to use FB.

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

basch wrote: post #293
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…

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,…

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by Groxx »

gfodor wrote: post #314
Groxx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can run Linux in my browser. Is Linux a website? https://bellard.org/jslinux/ You have to draw the line somewhere, or it becomes meaningless.

sure, for me the line is clearly on the side of "scrolling through boxes of text and basic commenting" = website, since that was the case in 1995. my point was that if you took a screenshot of facebook today and when it launched, other than some cosmetic improvements, you couldn't tell me which version warranted extreme dynamic application logic and which was just a dumb server generated HTML page. the point being th…

just gonna to chime in to say: yea, this is a defensible position IMO. where FB falls is debatable (they have a ton of features / different UI elements / etc), but I can see where you're coming from.

tbh I think the vast majority of this engineering absurdity is to prevent teams from stepping on each other unknowingly, not for any direct end-user benefit. a lot of work goes into "make it so I don't have to work with X to get my work done" in all businesses, and... I dunno. it's not always a bad thing, but it does feel like quite a lot of waste.

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

#489

Post by piccolbo »

asiachick wrote: post #441
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applicat…

How is this any different than native apps that offer the same functionality? The article is about facebook, not emacs. A native facebook apps is a much bigger privacy concern. The native app still stores your data in the cloud so you don't control it. It still can be using 3rd party libraries that are doing more than their stated function. It can still be communicating with servers from all over the world. On top of…

I am not sure that's what he or she was trying to say. Agree with everything you said about native apps. The question for me is if it's necessary for every page to run javascript, even if it doesn't have any app-like features, even if it's just a document. I would love to be able to turn off javascript and be able to browse the document-web without everything being broken. In the specific cases where I need dynamic or app-like behavior, then I can use javascript, or maybe even a separate app browser. https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-...
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