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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

engineering.fb.com

471–480 of 489 posts

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

#471
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…

Maybe they should rename it to Faceapp? It certainly has nothing to do with pages or a book anymore.

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

#472
post #212
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…

I guess it's optimized for some computers/networks but not for others. Right now I'm in an area without optical fiber so I have to use a 4g modem (12 MBps), I have an old 2013 MacBook Pro and even though my setup is far from being fast, I have no problems with most web pages, some few load kinda slow, but Facebook is in a different category, it's totally unusable, some stuff never even get to load. If I want to check…

New Reddit and all these JS-based websites are painfully slow for me on Safari on a modern MacBook despite being on an enterprise connection with 1Gbps and a few milliseconds ping to most of Europe. Bandwidth is not the only issue, processing all those megabytes of JS and (poorly) reimplementing browser behaviours in it is the main problem.

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

#473
post #279
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90's versions, like mbasic, of almost every website is better. More content, less noise. Mbasic could still use a flaming tag though

> 90's versions, like mbasic, of almost every website is better. I mostly disagree and assume this is slightly hyperbolic, but I take your point. The web used to be documents, even for things that needed to be apps (like email). Now, the web is apps, even for things that should be documents. Beyond that, the web was not the capitalist/SEO/marketer battleground that it is today, where many sites have so many costs beh…

> In the 90s, you could have a very popular message board with millions of pageviews a month for $30/mo.

You can still do that. A bare-metal dedicated server with an 4-core CPU, 32 GBs of RAM and SSDs can be rented for that price with unmetered bandwidth and it'll be more than enough to sustain that level of traffic.

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

#474
post #92

It uses scrolling as cookie consent, apparently. Which is wrong as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090393

It's not like Facebook is concerned about GDPR compliance, and given the lack of enforcement I can't really fault them for this.

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

#475
post #464
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's possible to both think that websites and web applications are worthy uses of the web, but also that many web applications would have been best engineered using 'classical' techniques from early websites. I agree with this. > There's a strong argument to be made in Facebook's case, since the core value proposition of Facebook hasn't changed much since it's inception, and it began its life as a server-side rende…

> You can then switch back and forth between an online marketplace and a streaming service without losing the state of your chat window. On the other hand, if you built these things with lighter-weight techniques, these separate parts of the application could be opened in separate browser tabs or windows (without your computer grinding to a halt from loading multiple instances of a gigantic SPA.)

I sometime wish iframes were more useful.

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

#476
post #471
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…

Maybe they should rename it to Faceapp? It certainly has nothing to do with pages or a book anymore.

And Apple doesn't sell fruit... what's your point?

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

#477
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more features? Facebook of 12 years ago didn't have groups, marketplace, dating, live videos, stories, ...

99% of that could have been implemented fine using the same technology. Live videos etc. are a scourge on the culture and I wouldn't miss them.

I guess you think television is a 'scourge on culture' as well then? Get a grip.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

>I really have no clue what they do for a living Writing code instead of playing with legos?

Oh yeah I forgot about the know it all white knights mindlessly defending the hive mind like soldier ants

Why do I bug you so much?

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it's a common trope. Everyone can create a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram clone in a week or so of intense work. But that's not actually the hard part. What's hard is getting millions of users in the first place and scaling to that magnitude. In that order.
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