5 ms·

You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Fac

by adtac 9y ago

You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Facebook comments. Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.) Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments? (Shameless plug to my own open source, lightweight and tracking-free comment engine alternative to Facebook, Disqus and the rest: https://github.com/adtac/commento https://github.com/adtac/commento)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
korzun 9y ago
> Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.) This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really a cause for concern in 2017. Especially when most of that stuff is already cached. > Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments? That's oversimplifying it. You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.
- adtac 9y ago
  > This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really. I'm from India; while my home network connection is pretty good, when I'm travelling anywhere outside the metros, the mobile network speed is abysmal. However quite a few news outlets employ Facebook's comment system. You can imagine what a nightmare it'll be for users to load all that with a 2G connection. > You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform. 37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activity. Wasn't there a recent article that discovered that FB continuously sent home the position of your cursor when you're scrolling through your newsfeed so that they can place ads better?
  - korzun 9y ago
    Your experience on 2G networks is already degraded; removing an asynchronous comment system will not magically fix it or make it better. > 37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activit You would lose that bet.
    - __jal 9y ago
      My solution is much easier. I block all known FB IPs via provisioning rules on my phone, and never have to see (or pay for) any of that crap.
- steventhedev 9y ago
  You're being downvoted because a large segment of HN is engineers who prefer sites like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://evenbettermotherfucking.website http://evenbettermotherfucking.website Basically, what it comes down to is that if all 37 requests are done in parallel, then you're only loading the page as slowly as the slowest. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. Worse, some of that JS is probably downloading more JS, which means that you will have multiple requests going out. On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception. Good news is that after that initial latency, the actual transfer should go fairly fast. On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS). If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Agreed with everything you said except > keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency. Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market. What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh. I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).
    - 9y ago
- zelos 9y ago
  I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
  - korzun 9y ago
    > I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection. Love the sarcasm. What devices are you talking about here? Name ten popular websites that will function on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection. Heck, give me a site that will properly work on Motorola Razr.
Omnius 9y ago
Not to hard to understand, i think, its bureaucracy, incremental changes and not dealing with the technical debt from the changes, having a farm of coders that just need to check off the that requirements were met. Now add a continuous stream of revenue and the only people that notice or care are technically oriented people.
leepowers 9y ago
Aside from the bureaucratic inertia that all large groups ultimately accumulate have you ever thought that this is by design? Facebook investing resources into really polishing and optimizing the web experience of comments doesn't really get people to use Facebook more. What they really want is for you to post your content, comment on it, and share it all from within the Facebook, and ideally from a highly-optimized Facebook app they completely control. Facebook Comments aren't designed to be a great experience. They're designed to funnel users into Facebook's ecosystem and to get them to use Facebook more. It's a marketing tool for Facebook.
SloughFeg 9y ago
Use mbasic.facebook.com. It can access any URL the heavy webclient can and uses no JS at all.
- sharpshadow 9y ago
  Didn't tried it, since I don't use Facebook, but if it is as lightweight as I image, it would be very great.
dilap 9y ago
Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy. And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode. Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)
- odbol_ 9y ago
  Design for Time Well Spent http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/
  - an27 9y ago
    Pretty inaccurate copy, claiming Google doesn't make money off your attention when they mainly subsist off ad revenue.
- slouch 9y ago
  Those "show more" buttons aren't about not loading text--they bring the ads below the content into your viewport sooner. The content is there the whole time.
  - dilap 9y ago
    Just tested with facebook comments and this seems to not be true. I cut the internet and tapped the "show more" and it failed to display. It didn't even make sense from a layout perspective. It was a comment with one reply, and in place of the reply, was text that said, "show one reply". Maybe they're doing it to drive analytics.
- slackoverflower 9y ago
  I think this is where Google's AMP succeeds. As much as people don't want to be in Google's walled garden and for them to destroy the open web, they have made visiting websites and reading articles much more pleasant. Their incredible engineering talent has done a great job tackling the problems you mentioned.
chestervonwinch 9y ago
Tangentially related: I don't mind the bells and whistles (such as bloated commenting systems) on desktop where my machine has resources to waste, but I wish more news sites made available a bare-bones, text-only version of their web site for browsing on mobile (e.g., http://thin.npr.org/ http://thin.npr.org/).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Aissen 9y ago
I think you're underestimating the issue. The core issue here is spam, and whether or not it's possible to make a non-centralized open source self-contained spam figthing engine is still unanswered. I'm not going to go into details, but I invite you to read this article for some background: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780.html https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....
niutech 9y ago
Muut (https://muut.com https://muut.com) is another alternative to Facebook comments.
tenkabuto 9y ago
Disqus isn't much better. I suggest that everyone look into not loading their Disqus comments by default but loading them when a Load Comments button is clicked. I did this recently on my blog and the request count and page weight went down an amazing amount. :)

by adtac 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

korzun 9y ago

> Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.) This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really a cause for concern in 2017. Especially when most of that stuff is already cached. > Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments? That's oversimplifying it. You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform.

adtac 9y ago
> This is an issue for a really small segment of users. Not really. I'm from India; while my home network connection is pretty good, when I'm travelling anywhere outside the metros, the mobile network speed is abysmal. However quite a few news outlets employ Facebook's comment system. You can imagine what a nightmare it'll be for users to load all that with a 2G connection. > You are loading 37 assets to support a social commenting platform. 37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activity. Wasn't there a recent article that discovered that FB continuously sent home the position of your cursor when you're scrolling through your newsfeed so that they can place ads better?
- korzun 9y ago
  Your experience on 2G networks is already degraded; removing an asynchronous comment system will not magically fix it or make it better. > 37 Javascript files out of which, I'm willing to bet, most are tracking agents employing every trick in the book to record all activit You would lose that bet.
  - __jal 9y ago
    My solution is much easier. I block all known FB IPs via provisioning rules on my phone, and never have to see (or pay for) any of that crap.
steventhedev 9y ago
You're being downvoted because a large segment of HN is engineers who prefer sites like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://evenbettermotherfucking.website http://evenbettermotherfucking.website Basically, what it comes down to is that if all 37 requests are done in parallel, then you're only loading the page as slowly as the slowest. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Most browsers will only make 6 concurrent requests from a server, which you can see in Firefox via the about:config page and the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. Worse, some of that JS is probably downloading more JS, which means that you will have multiple requests going out. On mobile, this means you're running 8-30 second delays for each "group" of requests, especially if you have poor reception. Good news is that after that initial latency, the actual transfer should go fairly fast. On the other hand, a social commenting program should need at a minimum 1 JS file, 1 CSS file, 1 for the actual data (3 comment texts, 3 base64 encoded profile pics at a small resolution). So FB is running at ~30x the optimum (87 assets, of which 35 are JS). If you think it's not that big a deal, I'd suggest taking a trip abroad or just out to some smaller towns in your area, and really experience why users feel the internet has not really gotten faster since the 90s (keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Agreed with everything you said except > keeping in mind users don't care about data size, they care about latency. Users do care about data size since there are still a lot of people on data limited contracts even in the UK which has a fairly healthy mobile market. What people don't necessarily realise is the connection between the two, I'd quite like it if the mobile browsers had a running total of the total amount of data transferred in that tab on each new visit/refresh. I'm a programmer and I still don't know which pages are heavy or not (given fixed bandwidth the time to interaction would be a clue but mobile internet latency is all over the map so you can't tell if it's a big site/page or just the mobile internet shitting the bed).
  - 9y ago
zelos 9y ago
I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection.
- korzun 9y ago
  > I know, it's not like huge numbers of people view web pages on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection. Love the sarcasm. What devices are you talking about here? Name ten popular websites that will function on low-powered devices with limited battery life connected via an unreliable, metered wireless internet connection. Heck, give me a site that will properly work on Motorola Razr.

Omnius 9y ago

Not to hard to understand, i think, its bureaucracy, incremental changes and not dealing with the technical debt from the changes, having a farm of coders that just need to check off the that requirements were met. Now add a continuous stream of revenue and the only people that notice or care are technically oriented people.

leepowers 9y ago

Aside from the bureaucratic inertia that all large groups ultimately accumulate have you ever thought that this is by design? Facebook investing resources into really polishing and optimizing the web experience of comments doesn't really get people to use Facebook more. What they really want is for you to post your content, comment on it, and share it all from within the Facebook, and ideally from a highly-optimized Facebook app they completely control. Facebook Comments aren't designed to be a great experience. They're designed to funnel users into Facebook's ecosystem and to get them to use Facebook more. It's a marketing tool for Facebook.

SloughFeg 9y ago

Use mbasic.facebook.com. It can access any URL the heavy webclient can and uses no JS at all.

sharpshadow 9y ago
Didn't tried it, since I don't use Facebook, but if it is as lightweight as I image, it would be very great.

dilap 9y ago

Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy. And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode. Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)

odbol_ 9y ago
Design for Time Well Spent http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/
- an27 9y ago
  Pretty inaccurate copy, claiming Google doesn't make money off your attention when they mainly subsist off ad revenue.
slouch 9y ago
Those "show more" buttons aren't about not loading text--they bring the ads below the content into your viewport sooner. The content is there the whole time.
- dilap 9y ago
  Just tested with facebook comments and this seems to not be true. I cut the internet and tapped the "show more" and it failed to display. It didn't even make sense from a layout perspective. It was a comment with one reply, and in place of the reply, was text that said, "show one reply". Maybe they're doing it to drive analytics.
slackoverflower 9y ago
I think this is where Google's AMP succeeds. As much as people don't want to be in Google's walled garden and for them to destroy the open web, they have made visiting websites and reading articles much more pleasant. Their incredible engineering talent has done a great job tackling the problems you mentioned.

chestervonwinch 9y ago

Tangentially related: I don't mind the bells and whistles (such as bloated commenting systems) on desktop where my machine has resources to waste, but I wish more news sites made available a bare-bones, text-only version of their web site for browsing on mobile (e.g., http://thin.npr.org/ http://thin.npr.org/).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Aissen 9y ago

I think you're underestimating the issue. The core issue here is spam, and whether or not it's possible to make a non-centralized open source self-contained spam figthing engine is still unanswered. I'm not going to go into details, but I invite you to read this article for some background: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780.html https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

niutech 9y ago

Muut (https://muut.com https://muut.com) is another alternative to Facebook comments.

tenkabuto 9y ago

Disqus isn't much better. I suggest that everyone look into not loading their Disqus comments by default but loading them when a Load Comments button is clicked. I did this recently on my blog and the request count and page weight went down an amazing amount. :)