Advancing technology doesn't make up for destroying humanity, IMO. Fuck Facebook.
Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
181–190 of 489 posts
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#182I have been using Facebook for like +10years. Facebook used to be reference for speed and usability. I left it ~4 years ago. Last day I entered again for curiosity. It's so sad. Strange interface, slow, unresponsive. It's sad.
Facebook used to be reference for speed and usability On web, for a while. Remember when Facebook's iPhone app came out, it was a disaster. It was so slow, I could open the app, then take the elevator down to the basement of my building, drop off some outgoing mail, and return to my apartment before it finished updating the news feed. It was legendary in its time for its slowness. At first, nobody complained because…
> I don't know how people who are addicted to Facebook manage to use it so much without going mad
That's the thing with the addiction. Once you get used to it, it doesn't matter how bad it is.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It has 96 .js scripts on a single page.
This used to be a bigger deal before HTTP/2 increased the number of concurrent requests to be virtually unlimited.
Unless I'm missing something, it's "optimal" for a site to have many split files. If their JavaScript were 1 file, a change to a single character would mean the need to re-download every bit of JavaScript. Instead, with 96 files, it would mean 95 of them are still cached client-side and only 1 is need of downloading.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#184Great write up. Glad to see they're making some changes as the current interface still feels like 2005 with the main feed at 500px wide. And as always, dark mode is welcome. I really hope this helps performance on the site. In the past year or so I've been noticing that when the page sits in an unfocused tab for a while, clicking back usually takes 20+ seconds to actually load and I'm stuck at a white screen. It actu…
About every 3 minutes I went a little mad with the new interface. With the old one, photos open, and you can click almost anywhere to close them. With the new (desktop) interface, you have to find the X to close the photo. No, no, not the X you find on the top right of every other interface ever. This time it's on the top left!
> top right of every other interface ever.
That doesn’t sound right.
Mac OS and at least some Linux desktop environments have buttons at top left.
Still, I agree with your general point: why change away from a tradition for little to negative benefit?
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#185Quite 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 still don't understand how the biggest websites get away with being so unbelievably bloated. My guess is that most people have medium to old phones and PCs that are bogged down with nonsense running in the background and facebook, instagram, twitter etc. run extra slow, but I guess people just put up with it.
people just put up with it
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#186Quite 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 agree with you; however, the key disconnect is that Facebook is not a photo, video, post and message sharing website. It's a marketing platform intended to extract the most value out of you, the viewer, and transfer that value to Facebook and its advertisers. If you think of it this way, you can see how you may need 2MB of CSS: to battle the bots trying to scrape your information and replicate your network, to side…
Unfortunately, you're right.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#187Quite 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…
> 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.
Were you using a machine with a gigabit connection, 32GB RAM, and 10th gen intel cpu like the devs?
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook used to be reference for speed and usability On web, for a while. Remember when Facebook's iPhone app came out, it was a disaster. It was so slow, I could open the app, then take the elevator down to the basement of my building, drop off some outgoing mail, and return to my apartment before it finished updating the news feed. It was legendary in its time for its slowness. At first, nobody complained because…
Remember when they had to monkey patch the android runtime because their app had too many methods? https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th... It's a fun hack, and I enjoy spectacle, but it might be a sign that you are complicating your app more than you need.
Remember when reached the limit for __TEXT and had to put code in sections that weren’t really meant for it: https://blog.timac.org/2016/1018-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...?
Remember when they were taking to long to start up that they pulled stuff into a separate framework just so they could meet launch deadlines: https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...?
Remember when the app had 18,000 Objective-C classes: https://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-t...?
Facebook’s teams somehow cannot manage their bloat and they keep hiring people to hack the platform they're running on rather than fixing the actual underlying problem.
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#189This 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.
>This is 100% incidental complexity. The article talked a lot about their new dark mode feature, how they wouldn't have been able to implement it in their old tech stack, and how they were able to reduce their CSS size while adding a dark mode. But is dark mode all that important? Even as a developer I don't care at all about FB having a dark mode, did they really need to rewrite their entire site to implement featur…
Dark mode is very important. Do you use Flux by the way?
Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
#190Quite 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…
Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.
That 2MB of CSS is legacy crap most of it they didn't use. It's the hallmark of Conway's law.