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I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fe

I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this landscape is just not worth it.

codeka 10y ago
Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support. I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops. If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm back at my computer to read fb messenges.
- galistoca 10y ago
  I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it's not an illogical decision. You are free to complain but it would be stupid for Facebook to keep going this way just so they can support the legacy technology.
  - lelandbatey 10y ago
    Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.
    - Ronsenshi 10y ago
      Con confirm. Worked with real time push notifications via Service Workers in Chrome myself.
    - galistoca 10y ago
      Please read my other comments on this thread. Basically just because Android supports it doesn't mean it's all good since iOS doesn't. Also the "open web" you think you have on Chrome is not really that open as you think if you think about the entire mobile ecosystem landscape.
  - colordrops 10y ago
    Android Chrome supports push notifications, even when the browser is not loaded.
    - galistoca 10y ago
      I keep saying this in every comment I made on this thread, but I'm talking about the entire mobile ecosystem. Who cares if Android Chrome supports it, iOS doesn't. Which means it's not a 100% coverage. Just by letting this happen you are providing a low quality service to not just the iOS users but also the Android users, since there will be an assumption that the recipient doesn't always get the message in realtime. If you want to send that kind of messages, there is always email. Messaging apps are built on assumptions that people know the other person receives push immediately.
      - suppressingfire 10y ago
        I call shenanigans for two reasons: 1) you can never assume a recipient ever has their phone on, with them and in a non-silent mode 2) users can disable push notifications for individual apps anyway
        galistoca 10y ago
        For some reason I feel like I have become some sort of FB defender, but I am not. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of FB. I even completely got rid of my FB account a year ago because I got sick of fake interactions on the site and have never looked back. I am happy with communicating with close people just via text and other special purpose communication apps. That said, the reasons you mention are pretty edge cases. Instead of just hating on it, just stop and think about it for a moment without prejudice. When you email someone you don't expect them to read it immediately, but when you send a text you at least expect them to know they received something, no? (If you say no to this, I really have nothing else to say anymore, you would be just denying the reality) That's what Facebook wants to be. They're competing with SMS, not email.
        10y ago
- personjerry 10y ago
  Safari doesn't though :/
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications. It is often better to have no feature than a bad feature. I've never used the mobile web messenger, but if it is unreliable, only works in a few browsers, it makes sense to remove the product.
  - yason 10y ago
    The mobile Facebook website worked fine with messages. You could see whether there were new messages and you could read them and reply to them. You could even chat a bit albeit not as conveniently as on a laptop or a messaging app such as Hangouts or Whatsapp. But it was just enough to keep you connected when needed.
  - codeka 10y ago
    > But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications. Sure, that's why they have the app. But it's not a reason to completely turn off messaging from the website. Heck, they could even turn off chrome notifications completely and the website would still be completely functional.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    More likely the chat team couldn't read your contacts through your web browser and decided to do something about it.
tuxracer 10y ago
Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement
- galistoca 10y ago
  As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it would mean it's depending on Google on both Android and iOS which means when it comes to mobile Facebook MUST go through Google 100% of the time. You may say they can use Firefox, but for the same reason, why would they add one more layer of gatekeeper just to let their users communicate? You need to realize this "open web" concept is not really open anymore when it comes to mobile.
  - johnny_reilly 10y ago
    I'm not sure that's true; Facebook are keen users of serviceworkers and the Facebook web app provides push notifications on Chrome in Android using just that mechanism.
    - galistoca 10y ago
      Why do people keep saying "Chrome supports push on Android" to criticize my comment which says "iOS chrome doesn't support push"? It feels like talking to a wall almost.
      - tuxracer 10y ago
        It's a paragraph long post. One sentence accurately says iOS Chrome (which is really Safari outside of Google's control with Chrome UI due to iOS restrictions) doesn't currently support push. The rest talks about it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to implement this (they already did), a rant about this being Google specific technology (it is not), and not being an open standard (it is).
pikachu_is_cool 10y ago
I'd agree with you if this was a company that actually sheds legacy tech gracefully, but Xcode can't handle our scale.
e12e 10y ago
Yeah, first they threw out xmpp, so I couldn't use my preffered messaging app, then they kill messaging in the web view, forcing me to give up messaging or move to their messaging app, with intrusive permissions. This after they've soundly established that they don't respect users, with how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app. At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it). I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing"). As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.
- shawn-butler 10y ago
  Please stop calling it google wave. It is Apache wave. And nothing is dead if a community wants it to be alive.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Apologies, I remember it as Google Wave - but you are right it has evolved, and Apache Wave captures the idea that it is indeed an open platform. And while I agree that the technology isn't dead, I don't think it (the protocol) is likely to be what ~7 billion people (or how many now has a phone number) will use to communicate across network providers, carriers, device manufactures and content silos. I think it is dead as an alternative in that sense.
k__ 10y ago
True story. Except native apps aren't the future :/
- pikachu_is_cool 10y ago
  JavaScript and the DOM certainly aren't.
Spooky23 10y ago
Sure. In my case that legacy burden is Facebook. I work for a living and carry a work phone that is managed due to compliance requirements. I could pop on Facebook and check the occasional message. Facebook makes the mobile web experience as user hostile as possible, but it's sort of works. Now I'm stuck, as are about 20,000 of my coworkers.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It's really interesting to me how controversial contrarian opinions to Facebook actions are in this forum. The parent has bounced up and down vote wise quite a bit. FB is a real lightning rod topic.
CalRobert 10y ago
" In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications " Says you. I'm perfectly happy not knowing about my FB messages until I go look for them. I DON'T WANT them pushed to me. If they want to send me something that needs to be read quickly, use email. Or gasp phone/text/whatsapp (I use the latter begrudgingly because whatsapp has pretty much replaced texting in lots of Europe).

codeka 10y ago

Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support. I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops. If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm back at my computer to read fb messenges.

galistoca 10y ago
I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it's not an illogical decision. You are free to complain but it would be stupid for Facebook to keep going this way just so they can support the legacy technology.
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.
  - Ronsenshi 10y ago
    Con confirm. Worked with real time push notifications via Service Workers in Chrome myself.
  - galistoca 10y ago
    Please read my other comments on this thread. Basically just because Android supports it doesn't mean it's all good since iOS doesn't. Also the "open web" you think you have on Chrome is not really that open as you think if you think about the entire mobile ecosystem landscape.
- colordrops 10y ago
  Android Chrome supports push notifications, even when the browser is not loaded.
  - galistoca 10y ago
    I keep saying this in every comment I made on this thread, but I'm talking about the entire mobile ecosystem. Who cares if Android Chrome supports it, iOS doesn't. Which means it's not a 100% coverage. Just by letting this happen you are providing a low quality service to not just the iOS users but also the Android users, since there will be an assumption that the recipient doesn't always get the message in realtime. If you want to send that kind of messages, there is always email. Messaging apps are built on assumptions that people know the other person receives push immediately.
    - suppressingfire 10y ago
      I call shenanigans for two reasons: 1) you can never assume a recipient ever has their phone on, with them and in a non-silent mode 2) users can disable push notifications for individual apps anyway
      - galistoca 10y ago
        For some reason I feel like I have become some sort of FB defender, but I am not. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of FB. I even completely got rid of my FB account a year ago because I got sick of fake interactions on the site and have never looked back. I am happy with communicating with close people just via text and other special purpose communication apps. That said, the reasons you mention are pretty edge cases. Instead of just hating on it, just stop and think about it for a moment without prejudice. When you email someone you don't expect them to read it immediately, but when you send a text you at least expect them to know they received something, no? (If you say no to this, I really have nothing else to say anymore, you would be just denying the reality) That's what Facebook wants to be. They're competing with SMS, not email.
        10y ago
personjerry 10y ago
Safari doesn't though :/
wodenokoto 10y ago
> I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications. It is often better to have no feature than a bad feature. I've never used the mobile web messenger, but if it is unreliable, only works in a few browsers, it makes sense to remove the product.
- yason 10y ago
  The mobile Facebook website worked fine with messages. You could see whether there were new messages and you could read them and reply to them. You could even chat a bit albeit not as conveniently as on a laptop or a messaging app such as Hangouts or Whatsapp. But it was just enough to keep you connected when needed.
- codeka 10y ago
  > But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications. Sure, that's why they have the app. But it's not a reason to completely turn off messaging from the website. Heck, they could even turn off chrome notifications completely and the website would still be completely functional.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  More likely the chat team couldn't read your contacts through your web browser and decided to do something about it.

tuxracer 10y ago

Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement

galistoca 10y ago
As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it would mean it's depending on Google on both Android and iOS which means when it comes to mobile Facebook MUST go through Google 100% of the time. You may say they can use Firefox, but for the same reason, why would they add one more layer of gatekeeper just to let their users communicate? You need to realize this "open web" concept is not really open anymore when it comes to mobile.
- johnny_reilly 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's true; Facebook are keen users of serviceworkers and the Facebook web app provides push notifications on Chrome in Android using just that mechanism.
  - galistoca 10y ago
    Why do people keep saying "Chrome supports push on Android" to criticize my comment which says "iOS chrome doesn't support push"? It feels like talking to a wall almost.
    - tuxracer 10y ago
      It's a paragraph long post. One sentence accurately says iOS Chrome (which is really Safari outside of Google's control with Chrome UI due to iOS restrictions) doesn't currently support push. The rest talks about it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to implement this (they already did), a rant about this being Google specific technology (it is not), and not being an open standard (it is).

pikachu_is_cool 10y ago

I'd agree with you if this was a company that actually sheds legacy tech gracefully, but Xcode can't handle our scale.

e12e 10y ago

Yeah, first they threw out xmpp, so I couldn't use my preffered messaging app, then they kill messaging in the web view, forcing me to give up messaging or move to their messaging app, with intrusive permissions. This after they've soundly established that they don't respect users, with how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app. At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it). I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing"). As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.

shawn-butler 10y ago
Please stop calling it google wave. It is Apache wave. And nothing is dead if a community wants it to be alive.
- e12e 10y ago
  Apologies, I remember it as Google Wave - but you are right it has evolved, and Apache Wave captures the idea that it is indeed an open platform. And while I agree that the technology isn't dead, I don't think it (the protocol) is likely to be what ~7 billion people (or how many now has a phone number) will use to communicate across network providers, carriers, device manufactures and content silos. I think it is dead as an alternative in that sense.

k__ 10y ago

True story. Except native apps aren't the future :/

pikachu_is_cool 10y ago
JavaScript and the DOM certainly aren't.

Spooky23 10y ago

Sure. In my case that legacy burden is Facebook. I work for a living and carry a work phone that is managed due to compliance requirements. I could pop on Facebook and check the occasional message. Facebook makes the mobile web experience as user hostile as possible, but it's sort of works. Now I'm stuck, as are about 20,000 of my coworkers.

Spooky23 10y ago
It's really interesting to me how controversial contrarian opinions to Facebook actions are in this forum. The parent has bounced up and down vote wise quite a bit. FB is a real lightning rod topic.

CalRobert 10y ago

" In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications " Says you. I'm perfectly happy not knowing about my FB messages until I go look for them. I DON'T WANT them pushed to me. If they want to send me something that needs to be read quickly, use email. Or gasp phone/text/whatsapp (I use the latter begrudgingly because whatsapp has pretty much replaced texting in lots of Europe).