12 ms·

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. It's even slower than the old websit

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. 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 can't make a photo, video, post and message sharing website that is not a pain to use. We collectively failed as a profession. If one needs 2MB of CSS for such a website, there is clearly a problem.

SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
The 2MB of CSS is needed to justify that headcount.
- robertoandred 6y ago
  Where are you getting 2MB from?
  - agluszak 6y ago
    "On our old site, we were loading more than 400 KB of compressed CSS (2 MB uncompressed) when loading the homepage, but only 10 percent of that was actually used for the initial render. We didn’t start out with that much CSS; it just grew over time and rarely decreased. This happened in part because every new feature meant adding new CSS."
    - robertoandred 6y ago
      Read the first four words.
starpilot 6y ago
Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.
- raphaelj 6y ago
  Wrong. The average user does not give a shit if the page is rendered server-side, or of it's a SPA. Geeks prefer speed, like everyone. There are plenty of papers that show that a reduction in latency improves the conversion rate. And it's does not have to be ugly to be fast.
- umvi 6y ago
  Geeks prefer function over form Consumers (apparently) prefer form over function (or at least, they are more easily fooled into thinking the more form, the more function)
  - mellow2020 6y ago
    I prefer form to follow function. Make it as pretty as you can, but not at the expense of the function.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Performance need not be coupled to idea of minimalist design. A performant website can still look like Facebook and not take 5000 ms to load.
- function_seven 6y ago
  Everyone hates slow webpages. Not just geeks. We can all argue over whether minimalism or eye-candy is preferred. But if your site feels like running in mud, it's frustrating regardless of the design. And all these SPA, client-side rendered, sites seems guilty of this. You navigate to a page, and it loads up "instantly", except you see nothing but gray placeholder images. Then content starts loading in, but haphazardly. You see a link you want to click, and you go to click it, when BAM! it jumps down 37 pixels because some stupid widget just loaded above it on the page. I really hate the modern web. Not the look of it, or the styling. The mechanics and slowness.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    I hope we someday enter a period of reform where our field begins to apply more rigor to our process. We have the tools to make a fast, sleek web. The process is very, very broken from an engineering perspective. The money seems to never stop, which is why businesses can burn through developers without too much regard to whether they are doing the right things. Maybe that can't be fixed, because the people in charge are going to keep the status quo going if the money is coming in and they're made to look good. Optimization is a risk that companies of even modest size find to be too great. Or perhaps people involved in a revamp/redesign/unification should be well compensated to the point where they are unlikely to leave in the middle of a multi-year project. I have a feeling based on my experience that a lot of these bad rebuilds are a result of too many engineers and designers coming and going.
notyourwork 6y ago
Agree whole heartedly, Facebook is a disgrace of a website and has been for years. Crazy how slow it is to load.
- lancesells 6y ago
  I think you could add Twitter and New Reddit to the list as well.
  - edhelas 6y ago
    In France we have a Craiglist-like website. They recently moved to ReactJS : https://www.leboncoin.fr/ 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 takes seconds to search a simple item on it. To compare, just try the same search on the Dutch equivalent, MarktPlaats, https://www.marktplaats.nl/ https://www.marktplaats.nl/. The experience is way snappier, way lighter, the features are the same, and it's just HTML + CSS + a bit of JS. We made a mistake with React/Vue/Angular. And we should really go back and stop using those frameworks.
    - girishso 6y ago
      Agreed. SPAs only make sense for few websites like Trello, for most other websites plain dynamic HTML with dash of ajax here and there are much better.
      - pier25 6y ago
        You know it's possible to use any of the modern JS frameworks without SPA, right?
    - julosflb 6y ago
      Could not agree more. It is barely usable now. The exact opposite of the original spirit. A complete failure.
freediver 6y ago
It is not a failure of the profession. There are engineering teams out there that excel at software performance. Granted they may not have billions of users. It is a matter of mindset and core values and those are hard to change.
tambourine_man 6y ago
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.
- edhelas 6y ago
  Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    better experience for who? For the developer it's a way better experience. For the consumer it often isn't because of inefficient bloat, but if effort is put into packaging it sensibly it can be better thanks to build pipelines/optimizations. In my experience, there's a lot of apps that would have never gotten written in the first place without the boost from React/Angular/etc. It simply takes way longer (which means also more expensive) to use "pure javascript and ajax."
    - munchbunny 6y ago
      I've been doing FE development on and off since IE5/6, starting out with pure JS and Ajax, and in my opinion the modern FE developer experience using the major frameworks is a generational improvement over the messes we used to write. There are still frustrations, but it's a lot better than it used to be. Browser API's and CSS have all improved drastically since then, so pure JS and Ajax isn't as bad. I still avoid frameworks for small things just to keep pages lightweight. But for heavyweight projects, if you don't use an established framework, you just end up with a shitty home-grown framework anyway, because the alternative, teams of developers working on the same site with no frameworks, is even worse.
      - freedomben 6y ago
dewey 6y ago
I guess they probably could build a nice and fast website if it was up to them. But there's probably a lot more requirements than just that. Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480?lang=en https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. This is probably the case for a lot of other decisions that slow down the page ("We need this A/B test framework", "this needs to be hidden to increase retention",...)
- 5cott0 6y ago
  >Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480.. https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480.... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. I've always suspected that the Div-itis plaguing fb's website is a result of React's dependence on the 𝚘̶𝚟̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚞̶𝚜̶𝚎̶ misuse of higher order components.
  - BrandonSmith 6y ago
    I'm not sure why FB's site has unnecessary DIVs... But to defend React, HOC or render prop techniques but don't have to output DOM. In other words, every React component does not map to a DOM element.
  - s-km 6y ago
    React components aren't a 1:1 mapping to the DOM, so you could in theory have 50 HoCs wrapping a single component and it still only output one div or whatever. Also, HoCs have somewhat fallen out of favour over time, with hooks and the child as a function/render prop style becoming more popular. I think the only HoC I consistently use these days is `connect` from `react-redux`.
    - lukevp 6y ago
      You can use hooks with redux now, so what’s the purpose of using connect instead of useDispatch or useSelector?
asumandiras 6y ago
> If one needs 2MB of CSS for such a website The 2MB was for the old site. The new site loads 20% or 400KB.
virvar 6y ago
Really? I really like it. I almost solely use Facebook to organise blood bowl matches, so it’s a lot of group chats and events, and it’s so much better than the old design. I haven’t noticed it being slower either, it’s certainly not fast, but it’s not really something I notice either.
kick 6y ago
The problem there is that '10k+' "engineers" are trying to make the same 'photo, video, post and message-sharing website'. It's a structural problem and little more: the website (and app) is their main money-maker, so they're going to give it a disproportionate amount of resources. Imagine you hire ten thousand people to lay one railroad track. [note; see end of post] If any single one of them doesn't contribute directly in some way, you'll fire them. This seems kind of strange, doesn't it? Sure, it probably requires more than a single person to lay a track. But ten thousand people to lay one? How is that supposed to work, mechanically? This would be enough to warrant shareholder revolt. Now, the railroad track gets broken a few hundred times, maybe they hammer it enough to make it twice as long, whatever. It now no longer resembles a railroad track. Certainly no train could go across it. Send a few hundred people to go ask the managers of this project for a replacement track. Okay, we're now at...maybe a tenth of people having contributed? Repeat this process until everyone's contributed. Maybe the manager gives different groups different materials for the track to fuck with them, whatever. But somehow, every single person manages to not get fired. What's the outcome look like? You have a single railroad track, probably not even well-fit for the job (sparks fly whenever trains run on it; maybe it causes them to tilt, so on), but it's laid! And ten thousand people are employed! It's the same thing with a website. You can't put a terabyte onto a user's device every single time they load your website; you just can't. So you have a window of performance you have to hit. Between ten thousand people trying to have things thrown onto user devices? Good luck making anything resembling 'decent'. It's the same problem that Dave Zarzycki noted in his talk about launchd[1], but worse. Instead of 512 megabytes shared between some random abstract parties you can basically ignore, it's <10MB shared between ten thousand coders, translators, graphic designers, users, managers, etc. Does something seem strange about this? [note]: This is the appropriate comparison here; at the scale of 'Over ten thousand people working on one program', it's grunt work, not art, science, or even programming. There's a word for implementation-grunts that's fallen out of favor in the past few decades: coders. This was seen as distinct until recently. [1] https://youtu.be/SjrtySM9Dns?t=255 https://youtu.be/SjrtySM9Dns?t=255
- soedirgo 6y ago
  I don't know how many people FB actually allocates for their main app, but this reminds me of a chapter in The Mythical Man-Month. It is said over 1000 people and 5000 man-years went into OS/360. I don't see it anywhere today. Instead, the book proposes The Surgical Team, i.e. about 10 people taking specialized roles, with the system being the product of the mind of a few key people. I wonder how well this aged.
ngngngng 6y ago
It really is appalling. I'm on a top of the line laptop with Gigabit internet and I can't do anything on Facebook without waiting several seconds for loading. Usually I only open it to check notifications. I just refreshed and counted and it took 9 seconds for the page to load and to show my notifications.
benbristow 6y ago
Twitter's new design is pretty fast. Sure, it does a lot less than Facebook but it's using similar modern SPA tech. Facebook is still pretty slow even on a Ryzen 3900x with 32GB of 3600mhz RAM. It's a lot better than it used to be though.
- snazz 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that Twitter did a pretty good job. After the initial load, it even works offline, so the actual API calls are the only thing that it's fetching over the network.
  - thomaslord 6y ago
    After the twitter update, I can't seem to get the initial load of an individual tweet to work. Ever, on any device, on any network. I encounter this issue on my laptop (on both Windows and Ubuntu), on my desktop (also both Windows and Ubuntu) and on my Android phone. It doesn't matter if I'm logged in or not, I always get "something went wrong" when I load the page and have to refresh at least once.
smhinsey 6y ago
All this and the chronological sort mode is still totally broken. Third post in my feed is 3 days old followed by one 2 hours. Total joke.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  They really don't want you sorting chronologically. That negates The Algorithm™.
SN76477 6y ago
I wish they would just give us APIs and let us build our own experience.
- OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  But then how would they force us to look at ads? How would they keep all their valuable data locked in their walled garden? Sadly I don’t think we’re ever going back to the glory days of open APIs.
- cjhopman 6y ago
  I'm curious what your response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff was? Open APIs to build your own experience are like 100 times worse than that, at least the APIs that CA used were limited (such that they didn't provide enough info to actually recreate FB) and required CA to sign a developer agreement with FB to restrict how they could be used.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    How are they worse? The API would just produce my timeline, for example. The raw data. And only with my credentials. How is it different from just browsing? Except the ads, the spying, etc. Browsing fb.com manually is like using an extremely clunky and slow visual API.
jseliger 6y ago
Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago We'll see what the data show. I have been reading comments about Facebook's supposed decline for as long as I've been aware of Facebook and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...
- detaro 6y ago
  Engagement isn't just driven by "enjoyability", so that's not a particular convincing counter-argument.
- mnd999 6y ago
  There’s a lot of fake profiles though and I think a lot more than they’re prepared to admit. Even brazen binary options trading scam profiles don’t get removed - it appears that they’re happy as long as the number are going up.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    They’re trying to police 2.5 billion accounts with 45 thousand employees (including HR, developers). I’m not surprised they stuck. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not OK for them to suck, but I’m not surprised given the 55,555:1 accounts:staff ratio.
- aguyfromnb 6y ago
  >and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. Do you think this might have anything to do with the fact that, as an advertising company, it's crucial that they are able to tell companies that engagement is increasing?
- slipheen 6y ago
  I've seen people in the past make the mistake of correlating "Enjoyment" with "Higher Engagement", but you want to be really careful there. For example - Flame wars increase engagement, even if people feel drained and frustrated afterward. I understand why it's a useful metric - It's particularly valuable if your business model depends on time-on-site to sell ads. But I wouldn't recommend them as a proxy for enjoyment by any means.
suyash 6y ago
Let's not even get started with thir mobile apps, horribly large in size, poorly engineered (performance) and privacy loopholes are everywhere (perhaps by design).
freepor 6y ago
Facebook isn’t trying to maximize your enjoyment, they’re trying to maximize their profits. By that measure they are doing vastly better than 12 years ago.
ulfw 6y ago
Agreed. Using this on the i9 8-core 16" MBP and the thing just isn't fluid. Has anyone at Facebook even bothered testing this on computers people actually use? Like some 2015 Macbook Pro? Or a 2014 Macbook Air or whatever. I wouldn't even want to know how it runs on those.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  I've got a 2015 MBP. FB is pretty sluggish, and I wonder why. When you send someone a list of notifications, it's probably worth getting the data ready in case they click it. And the resource usage is pretty big as well. The mobile app seems to be just fine though, perhaps they want to push people to use that.
yagodragon 6y ago
I can't decide whether I love or hate the UX of this new stack. It certainly feels more like an app now than a website. I like the new basic layout, "app shell" or tier 1 rendering. It feels like the First Contentful Paint is improved and some random layout shifts have eliminated. It might take a couple of seconds more to load something but it appears where you expect it to appear. On the other hand, navigation and clicking around is still sooo slow. My 60-year-old aunt called me and asked if she needs a new pc because facebook makes her laptop fans spin like crazy. I couldn't explain to her about all this react-redux-graphql thing and frankly, she doesn't care. All she cares is that facebook is slow and all she does is post photos and talk with friends like she did 10 years ago.
scep12 6y ago
I don't use Facebook but how do you know it's not BE calls that are creating the slow experience? It sounds like they rewrote the FE not the entire system.
BubRoss 6y ago
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.
- marcodave 6y ago
  people just put up with it
dhimes 6y ago
I don't know if I have the new stuff or not, but I agree that some parts are currently frustratingly slow to use on desktop. I figured it was because so many people are spending much more time on it (including, tbh, me). But I was trying to message with an old friend and simple gave up a few days ago.
ipython 6y ago
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 sidestep the evil developers of adblocker software that threaten to destroy the sweet value transfer, the JS required to track every single movement you make both online and off, the A/B testing framework that allows you to determine how to most efficiently extract that extra 0.001% of valuable eyeball time, and so forth... Connecting the world? Well, I guess that could be a nice side-effect...
- rosstex 6y ago
  Unfortunately, you're right.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  These views are aligned. A site that's fast and a pleasure to use advances both agendas. It's still a failure.
  - radicalbyte 6y ago
    Only if there's competition. The network effect ensures that there is no competition. Leaving us where we currently are.
    - karmakaze 6y ago
      Not even, users can just 'not play' (or play less) if the game's no fun.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        There are many users for which it is not fun, but an addiction. I have spoken to lots of people who say about once a month something like "Yeah, facebook is really bad for me, I just waste time and get upset", but they can't stop checking it every hour, and responding to posts that touch them emotionally, in either a good or bad way. That's by design, of course - it benefits Facebook greatly that its herd is addicted, and unlike people addicted to alcohol, nicotine or other substances - there's not even another supplier they can turn to: It's either feed your addiction or suffer withdrawal symptoms. And I think the success rate of quitters (as a percentage of those who actually want to quit) is also comparable, at single digit percent.
strictnein 6y ago
Remember when working at a FAANG company was supposed to be some mark of pride?
HumblyTossed 6y ago
> 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?
gkoberger 6y ago
I'm not a Facebook (the company) apologist by any means, and only use it because there's a few groups on it relevant to a company I own. That being said, I find the new FB to be insanely fast. I don't even block ads on it. I do agree Facebook was way better 12 years ago (I saw real updates and photos about friends, rather than companies and ads). But speed right now hasn't been the problem.
mister_hn 6y ago
There's too much CSS and JS because of web components and too many teams. * team for web component A => CSS, JS * Team for web component B => CSS, JS And so on with 1000+ components, Ends up to be a big pile of mud and everything maybe duplicated, just got a different name and failed to be optimised away and removed.
crazygringo 6y ago
For me the performance seems better. It also seems strange that if one of their two main publicly stated goals was to increase performance (the other goal being ease of maintenance), that it would slow down. Maybe you have extensions interfering? Also, the set and scale of features in the Facebook app makes it literally one of the most complex webapps out there. It's far more than just multimedia posts+messaging -- it's a marketplace, dating, games, apps, groups, pages, and more. Nobody's "failing". And the 2MB of CSS was the "before" uncompressed. The "before" compressed was 400 KB, and this update appears to reduce it to under 80KB compressed. That's 96% less than the 2MB you're complaining about, more than an entire order of magnitude. So Facebook seems to be improving here, no? I fail to see what is a "total failure" or "clearly a problem".
tarsinge 6y ago
I haven’t tested but I doubt the problem is with the CSS, is it?
hindsightbias 6y ago
Looking at the internet today, I think we need to lower our expectations and be realistic. At least in the US. We are still driving 60mph on freeways and what trains we have do not travel at 300kph. Perhaps many of us flipped out when we only had 9600 baud modems, but you could get up, brew some tea, walk the dog, or read a book while waiting for a page to load. We all had so much more patience back then. Why do we need instant gratification with FB and other social media? Maybe, or maybe not /s.
- goatlover 6y ago
  Because the underlying computing technology has gotten so much faster, unlike the case with cars and roads.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    And computing technology is not beholden to oil/car interests and NIMBYs.
taway555 6y ago
I'm not sure what your setup is, but 8 seconds to load a profile is not my experience. It takes less than a second here. This is an anecdotal datapoint that is insanely useless in the real world, but the fact that it is the top comment is typical of this site.
deadbunny 6y ago
The new design is so laughably bad. I was trying to send a message to someone on the website, it took 10+ seconds to open the chat window then when typing it couldn't keep up with my typing (I'm not an especially fast typer either). It was like having a 5 second ping over SSH. This is on top of the (pinned) tab regularly needing to be closed as it slowly takes up system resources. This is all on my 8core/32gb workstation. I can't even imagine how much utterly useless crap they are running in JS to make that kind of experience. On the bright side it does mean I am weaning myself off as keeping a pinned tab open is a non starter so I can't just have a quick refresh. And I'll be fucked if I'm installing their apps on my phone. So I guess thanks needs to goto the FB engineers for making their new website so utterly garbage that the tiny dopamine hits driven by the FB algorithms are worth less than the pain caused when using the site.
sktrdie 6y ago
You’re missing their main goal: having an easier-to-change codebase. Apparently this is way more economically rewarding than performance for Facebook. With that in mind, who cares if the site is slow (btw this is the only complaint of your rant). If the software requires a few devs to change and a few eyes to maintain, they can literally scale as much as they want. And actually now they’re probably in a way better position than they would if they had developed a super performant but unmaintainable site. The quote, premature optimization is the root of all evil, is still very much valid imho.
js2 6y ago
I wonder if they fixed the bug where if you visit the site with Safari on an iPad, when you try to type a comment, every space becomes two spaces. Also, I wonder if paste (command-v) is also randomly blocked at times. I use mbasic.facebook.com as much as possible. Occasionally I'll use m.facebook.com. I've had the mobile apps uninstalled for ages.
lawn 6y ago
> It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers can't make a photo, video, post and message sharing website that is not a pain to use. Too many cooks spoil the stew. I might even go so far to say that 10 engineers would have a larger chance of success than 10k+ engineers.
- Impossible 6y ago
  This was my experience at Facebook. Attempting things with a small team (or heaven forbid by yourself) was heavily frowned upon because it didn't justify manager and director salaries. As a result you ended up with poorly performing over-engineered code bases that prefered complex, expensive systems that would take multiple teams to build, but for whatever reason complexity that would improve performance was frowned upon. I'm sure this is common at many big tech companies. I didn't work on the mainline FB app but it seemed like part of the culture.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    When were you there, if you don't mind me asking?
EGreg 6y ago
Can you please compare the speed of https://yang2020.app/events https://yang2020.app/events ? On the mobile web or desktop, either one. (We're running it off of one server, it might get the HN effect, we'll see.) We have been building our own, open source social networking platform and we have tried to make a lot of things more efficient while doing so. The site I linked to didn't minify any files or optimize images. However, it loads things on demand as needed, and even lazy-loads entire components. Is it faster than Facebook? We have our own component system, not React. Here is a site that did minify and combine all files: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org And here is the platform we used: https://gitub.com/Qbix/Platform https://gitub.com/Qbix/Platform (warning: not all of it is documented, but enough, at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide).
- discreteevent 6y ago
  I've never been on Facebook so I can't compare but your site responds pretty quickly for me. Also you left out the h in GitHub in your link so it goes to a domain for sale site.
todd3834 6y ago
At a company I used to work for, we worked so hard to make sure our web app would load extremely fast… just to end up losing the battle with the data and analytics team for analytics scripts. They used a tag manager (tealium) which by itself can be used for good but it ultimately gave the other team the ability to overload our site with 3rd party scripts.
robertoandred 6y ago
Where did you get 2MB from?
x3blah 6y ago
Does the compensation of those "engineers" reflect that they have "failed"? Perhaps there is another way to evaluate the work, not from the perspective of the user waiting in front of a screen. Do not forget that the money to pay the salaries of those who do this work does not come from users.
tim333 6y ago
There's always m.facebook.com if you want a retro experience.

SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago

The 2MB of CSS is needed to justify that headcount.

robertoandred 6y ago
Where are you getting 2MB from?
- agluszak 6y ago
  "On our old site, we were loading more than 400 KB of compressed CSS (2 MB uncompressed) when loading the homepage, but only 10 percent of that was actually used for the initial render. We didn’t start out with that much CSS; it just grew over time and rarely decreased. This happened in part because every new feature meant adding new CSS."
  - robertoandred 6y ago
    Read the first four words.

starpilot 6y ago

Comments like these remind of an old post on Slashdot, "What makes a good website?" Ask "geeks" what they prefer, it's usually minimalism, no images, consistent text styling. In the end, the ideal format becomes a text file without markup. I think we need to accept the opinions of techies are increasingly irrelevant in tech. It's like being fine artist getting paid to design flyers or a chef making burgers.

raphaelj 6y ago
Wrong. The average user does not give a shit if the page is rendered server-side, or of it's a SPA. Geeks prefer speed, like everyone. There are plenty of papers that show that a reduction in latency improves the conversion rate. And it's does not have to be ugly to be fast.
umvi 6y ago
Geeks prefer function over form Consumers (apparently) prefer form over function (or at least, they are more easily fooled into thinking the more form, the more function)
- mellow2020 6y ago
  I prefer form to follow function. Make it as pretty as you can, but not at the expense of the function.
notyourwork 6y ago
Performance need not be coupled to idea of minimalist design. A performant website can still look like Facebook and not take 5000 ms to load.
function_seven 6y ago
Everyone hates slow webpages. Not just geeks. We can all argue over whether minimalism or eye-candy is preferred. But if your site feels like running in mud, it's frustrating regardless of the design. And all these SPA, client-side rendered, sites seems guilty of this. You navigate to a page, and it loads up "instantly", except you see nothing but gray placeholder images. Then content starts loading in, but haphazardly. You see a link you want to click, and you go to click it, when BAM! it jumps down 37 pixels because some stupid widget just loaded above it on the page. I really hate the modern web. Not the look of it, or the styling. The mechanics and slowness.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  I hope we someday enter a period of reform where our field begins to apply more rigor to our process. We have the tools to make a fast, sleek web. The process is very, very broken from an engineering perspective. The money seems to never stop, which is why businesses can burn through developers without too much regard to whether they are doing the right things. Maybe that can't be fixed, because the people in charge are going to keep the status quo going if the money is coming in and they're made to look good. Optimization is a risk that companies of even modest size find to be too great. Or perhaps people involved in a revamp/redesign/unification should be well compensated to the point where they are unlikely to leave in the middle of a multi-year project. I have a feeling based on my experience that a lot of these bad rebuilds are a result of too many engineers and designers coming and going.

notyourwork 6y ago

Agree whole heartedly, Facebook is a disgrace of a website and has been for years. Crazy how slow it is to load.

lancesells 6y ago
I think you could add Twitter and New Reddit to the list as well.
- edhelas 6y ago
  In France we have a Craiglist-like website. They recently moved to ReactJS : https://www.leboncoin.fr/ 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 takes seconds to search a simple item on it. To compare, just try the same search on the Dutch equivalent, MarktPlaats, https://www.marktplaats.nl/ https://www.marktplaats.nl/. The experience is way snappier, way lighter, the features are the same, and it's just HTML + CSS + a bit of JS. We made a mistake with React/Vue/Angular. And we should really go back and stop using those frameworks.
  - girishso 6y ago
    Agreed. SPAs only make sense for few websites like Trello, for most other websites plain dynamic HTML with dash of ajax here and there are much better.
    - pier25 6y ago
      You know it's possible to use any of the modern JS frameworks without SPA, right?
  - julosflb 6y ago
    Could not agree more. It is barely usable now. The exact opposite of the original spirit. A complete failure.

freediver 6y ago

It is not a failure of the profession. There are engineering teams out there that excel at software performance. Granted they may not have billions of users. It is a matter of mindset and core values and those are hard to change.

tambourine_man 6y ago

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.

edhelas 6y ago
Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.
- freedomben 6y ago
  better experience for who? For the developer it's a way better experience. For the consumer it often isn't because of inefficient bloat, but if effort is put into packaging it sensibly it can be better thanks to build pipelines/optimizations. In my experience, there's a lot of apps that would have never gotten written in the first place without the boost from React/Angular/etc. It simply takes way longer (which means also more expensive) to use "pure javascript and ajax."
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    I've been doing FE development on and off since IE5/6, starting out with pure JS and Ajax, and in my opinion the modern FE developer experience using the major frameworks is a generational improvement over the messes we used to write. There are still frustrations, but it's a lot better than it used to be. Browser API's and CSS have all improved drastically since then, so pure JS and Ajax isn't as bad. I still avoid frameworks for small things just to keep pages lightweight. But for heavyweight projects, if you don't use an established framework, you just end up with a shitty home-grown framework anyway, because the alternative, teams of developers working on the same site with no frameworks, is even worse.
    - freedomben 6y ago

dewey 6y ago

I guess they probably could build a nice and fast website if it was up to them. But there's probably a lot more requirements than just that. Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480?lang=en https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. This is probably the case for a lot of other decisions that slow down the page ("We need this A/B test framework", "this needs to be hidden to increase retention",...)

5cott0 6y ago
>Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480.. https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480.... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. I've always suspected that the Div-itis plaguing fb's website is a result of React's dependence on the 𝚘̶𝚟̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚞̶𝚜̶𝚎̶ misuse of higher order components.
- BrandonSmith 6y ago
  I'm not sure why FB's site has unnecessary DIVs... But to defend React, HOC or render prop techniques but don't have to output DOM. In other words, every React component does not map to a DOM element.
- s-km 6y ago
  React components aren't a 1:1 mapping to the DOM, so you could in theory have 50 HoCs wrapping a single component and it still only output one div or whatever. Also, HoCs have somewhat fallen out of favour over time, with hooks and the child as a function/render prop style becoming more popular. I think the only HoC I consistently use these days is `connect` from `react-redux`.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    You can use hooks with redux now, so what’s the purpose of using connect instead of useDispatch or useSelector?

asumandiras 6y ago

> If one needs 2MB of CSS for such a website The 2MB was for the old site. The new site loads 20% or 400KB.

virvar 6y ago

Really? I really like it. I almost solely use Facebook to organise blood bowl matches, so it’s a lot of group chats and events, and it’s so much better than the old design. I haven’t noticed it being slower either, it’s certainly not fast, but it’s not really something I notice either.

kick 6y ago

The problem there is that '10k+' "engineers" are trying to make the same 'photo, video, post and message-sharing website'. It's a structural problem and little more: the website (and app) is their main money-maker, so they're going to give it a disproportionate amount of resources. Imagine you hire ten thousand people to lay one railroad track. [note; see end of post] If any single one of them doesn't contribute directly in some way, you'll fire them. This seems kind of strange, doesn't it? Sure, it probably requires more than a single person to lay a track. But ten thousand people to lay one? How is that supposed to work, mechanically? This would be enough to warrant shareholder revolt. Now, the railroad track gets broken a few hundred times, maybe they hammer it enough to make it twice as long, whatever. It now no longer resembles a railroad track. Certainly no train could go across it. Send a few hundred people to go ask the managers of this project for a replacement track. Okay, we're now at...maybe a tenth of people having contributed? Repeat this process until everyone's contributed. Maybe the manager gives different groups different materials for the track to fuck with them, whatever. But somehow, every single person manages to not get fired. What's the outcome look like? You have a single railroad track, probably not even well-fit for the job (sparks fly whenever trains run on it; maybe it causes them to tilt, so on), but it's laid! And ten thousand people are employed! It's the same thing with a website. You can't put a terabyte onto a user's device every single time they load your website; you just can't. So you have a window of performance you have to hit. Between ten thousand people trying to have things thrown onto user devices? Good luck making anything resembling 'decent'. It's the same problem that Dave Zarzycki noted in his talk about launchd[1], but worse. Instead of 512 megabytes shared between some random abstract parties you can basically ignore, it's <10MB shared between ten thousand coders, translators, graphic designers, users, managers, etc. Does something seem strange about this? [note]: This is the appropriate comparison here; at the scale of 'Over ten thousand people working on one program', it's grunt work, not art, science, or even programming. There's a word for implementation-grunts that's fallen out of favor in the past few decades: coders. This was seen as distinct until recently. [1] https://youtu.be/SjrtySM9Dns?t=255 https://youtu.be/SjrtySM9Dns?t=255

soedirgo 6y ago
I don't know how many people FB actually allocates for their main app, but this reminds me of a chapter in The Mythical Man-Month. It is said over 1000 people and 5000 man-years went into OS/360. I don't see it anywhere today. Instead, the book proposes The Surgical Team, i.e. about 10 people taking specialized roles, with the system being the product of the mind of a few key people. I wonder how well this aged.

ngngngng 6y ago

It really is appalling. I'm on a top of the line laptop with Gigabit internet and I can't do anything on Facebook without waiting several seconds for loading. Usually I only open it to check notifications. I just refreshed and counted and it took 9 seconds for the page to load and to show my notifications.

benbristow 6y ago

Twitter's new design is pretty fast. Sure, it does a lot less than Facebook but it's using similar modern SPA tech. Facebook is still pretty slow even on a Ryzen 3900x with 32GB of 3600mhz RAM. It's a lot better than it used to be though.

snazz 6y ago
Yeah, I think that Twitter did a pretty good job. After the initial load, it even works offline, so the actual API calls are the only thing that it's fetching over the network.
- thomaslord 6y ago
  After the twitter update, I can't seem to get the initial load of an individual tweet to work. Ever, on any device, on any network. I encounter this issue on my laptop (on both Windows and Ubuntu), on my desktop (also both Windows and Ubuntu) and on my Android phone. It doesn't matter if I'm logged in or not, I always get "something went wrong" when I load the page and have to refresh at least once.

smhinsey 6y ago

All this and the chronological sort mode is still totally broken. Third post in my feed is 3 days old followed by one 2 hours. Total joke.

jaywalk 6y ago
They really don't want you sorting chronologically. That negates The Algorithm™.

SN76477 6y ago

I wish they would just give us APIs and let us build our own experience.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
But then how would they force us to look at ads? How would they keep all their valuable data locked in their walled garden? Sadly I don’t think we’re ever going back to the glory days of open APIs.
cjhopman 6y ago
I'm curious what your response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff was? Open APIs to build your own experience are like 100 times worse than that, at least the APIs that CA used were limited (such that they didn't provide enough info to actually recreate FB) and required CA to sign a developer agreement with FB to restrict how they could be used.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  How are they worse? The API would just produce my timeline, for example. The raw data. And only with my credentials. How is it different from just browsing? Except the ads, the spying, etc. Browsing fb.com manually is like using an extremely clunky and slow visual API.

jseliger 6y ago

Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago We'll see what the data show. I have been reading comments about Facebook's supposed decline for as long as I've been aware of Facebook and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

detaro 6y ago
Engagement isn't just driven by "enjoyability", so that's not a particular convincing counter-argument.
mnd999 6y ago
There’s a lot of fake profiles though and I think a lot more than they’re prepared to admit. Even brazen binary options trading scam profiles don’t get removed - it appears that they’re happy as long as the number are going up.
- ben_w 6y ago
  They’re trying to police 2.5 billion accounts with 45 thousand employees (including HR, developers). I’m not surprised they stuck. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not OK for them to suck, but I’m not surprised given the 55,555:1 accounts:staff ratio.
aguyfromnb 6y ago
>and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. Do you think this might have anything to do with the fact that, as an advertising company, it's crucial that they are able to tell companies that engagement is increasing?
slipheen 6y ago
I've seen people in the past make the mistake of correlating "Enjoyment" with "Higher Engagement", but you want to be really careful there. For example - Flame wars increase engagement, even if people feel drained and frustrated afterward. I understand why it's a useful metric - It's particularly valuable if your business model depends on time-on-site to sell ads. But I wouldn't recommend them as a proxy for enjoyment by any means.

suyash 6y ago

Let's not even get started with thir mobile apps, horribly large in size, poorly engineered (performance) and privacy loopholes are everywhere (perhaps by design).

freepor 6y ago

Facebook isn’t trying to maximize your enjoyment, they’re trying to maximize their profits. By that measure they are doing vastly better than 12 years ago.

ulfw 6y ago

Agreed. Using this on the i9 8-core 16" MBP and the thing just isn't fluid. Has anyone at Facebook even bothered testing this on computers people actually use? Like some 2015 Macbook Pro? Or a 2014 Macbook Air or whatever. I wouldn't even want to know how it runs on those.

lordnacho 6y ago
I've got a 2015 MBP. FB is pretty sluggish, and I wonder why. When you send someone a list of notifications, it's probably worth getting the data ready in case they click it. And the resource usage is pretty big as well. The mobile app seems to be just fine though, perhaps they want to push people to use that.

yagodragon 6y ago

I can't decide whether I love or hate the UX of this new stack. It certainly feels more like an app now than a website. I like the new basic layout, "app shell" or tier 1 rendering. It feels like the First Contentful Paint is improved and some random layout shifts have eliminated. It might take a couple of seconds more to load something but it appears where you expect it to appear. On the other hand, navigation and clicking around is still sooo slow. My 60-year-old aunt called me and asked if she needs a new pc because facebook makes her laptop fans spin like crazy. I couldn't explain to her about all this react-redux-graphql thing and frankly, she doesn't care. All she cares is that facebook is slow and all she does is post photos and talk with friends like she did 10 years ago.

scep12 6y ago

I don't use Facebook but how do you know it's not BE calls that are creating the slow experience? It sounds like they rewrote the FE not the entire system.

BubRoss 6y ago

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.

marcodave 6y ago
people just put up with it

dhimes 6y ago

I don't know if I have the new stuff or not, but I agree that some parts are currently frustratingly slow to use on desktop. I figured it was because so many people are spending much more time on it (including, tbh, me). But I was trying to message with an old friend and simple gave up a few days ago.

ipython 6y ago

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 sidestep the evil developers of adblocker software that threaten to destroy the sweet value transfer, the JS required to track every single movement you make both online and off, the A/B testing framework that allows you to determine how to most efficiently extract that extra 0.001% of valuable eyeball time, and so forth... Connecting the world? Well, I guess that could be a nice side-effect...

rosstex 6y ago
Unfortunately, you're right.
karmakaze 6y ago
These views are aligned. A site that's fast and a pleasure to use advances both agendas. It's still a failure.
- radicalbyte 6y ago
  Only if there's competition. The network effect ensures that there is no competition. Leaving us where we currently are.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    Not even, users can just 'not play' (or play less) if the game's no fun.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      There are many users for which it is not fun, but an addiction. I have spoken to lots of people who say about once a month something like "Yeah, facebook is really bad for me, I just waste time and get upset", but they can't stop checking it every hour, and responding to posts that touch them emotionally, in either a good or bad way. That's by design, of course - it benefits Facebook greatly that its herd is addicted, and unlike people addicted to alcohol, nicotine or other substances - there's not even another supplier they can turn to: It's either feed your addiction or suffer withdrawal symptoms. And I think the success rate of quitters (as a percentage of those who actually want to quit) is also comparable, at single digit percent.

strictnein 6y ago

Remember when working at a FAANG company was supposed to be some mark of pride?

HumblyTossed 6y ago

> 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?

gkoberger 6y ago

I'm not a Facebook (the company) apologist by any means, and only use it because there's a few groups on it relevant to a company I own. That being said, I find the new FB to be insanely fast. I don't even block ads on it. I do agree Facebook was way better 12 years ago (I saw real updates and photos about friends, rather than companies and ads). But speed right now hasn't been the problem.

mister_hn 6y ago

There's too much CSS and JS because of web components and too many teams. * team for web component A => CSS, JS * Team for web component B => CSS, JS And so on with 1000+ components, Ends up to be a big pile of mud and everything maybe duplicated, just got a different name and failed to be optimised away and removed.

crazygringo 6y ago

For me the performance seems better. It also seems strange that if one of their two main publicly stated goals was to increase performance (the other goal being ease of maintenance), that it would slow down. Maybe you have extensions interfering? Also, the set and scale of features in the Facebook app makes it literally one of the most complex webapps out there. It's far more than just multimedia posts+messaging -- it's a marketplace, dating, games, apps, groups, pages, and more. Nobody's "failing". And the 2MB of CSS was the "before" uncompressed. The "before" compressed was 400 KB, and this update appears to reduce it to under 80KB compressed. That's 96% less than the 2MB you're complaining about, more than an entire order of magnitude. So Facebook seems to be improving here, no? I fail to see what is a "total failure" or "clearly a problem".

tarsinge 6y ago

I haven’t tested but I doubt the problem is with the CSS, is it?

hindsightbias 6y ago

Looking at the internet today, I think we need to lower our expectations and be realistic. At least in the US. We are still driving 60mph on freeways and what trains we have do not travel at 300kph. Perhaps many of us flipped out when we only had 9600 baud modems, but you could get up, brew some tea, walk the dog, or read a book while waiting for a page to load. We all had so much more patience back then. Why do we need instant gratification with FB and other social media? Maybe, or maybe not /s.

goatlover 6y ago
Because the underlying computing technology has gotten so much faster, unlike the case with cars and roads.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  And computing technology is not beholden to oil/car interests and NIMBYs.

taway555 6y ago

I'm not sure what your setup is, but 8 seconds to load a profile is not my experience. It takes less than a second here. This is an anecdotal datapoint that is insanely useless in the real world, but the fact that it is the top comment is typical of this site.

deadbunny 6y ago

The new design is so laughably bad. I was trying to send a message to someone on the website, it took 10+ seconds to open the chat window then when typing it couldn't keep up with my typing (I'm not an especially fast typer either). It was like having a 5 second ping over SSH. This is on top of the (pinned) tab regularly needing to be closed as it slowly takes up system resources. This is all on my 8core/32gb workstation. I can't even imagine how much utterly useless crap they are running in JS to make that kind of experience. On the bright side it does mean I am weaning myself off as keeping a pinned tab open is a non starter so I can't just have a quick refresh. And I'll be fucked if I'm installing their apps on my phone. So I guess thanks needs to goto the FB engineers for making their new website so utterly garbage that the tiny dopamine hits driven by the FB algorithms are worth less than the pain caused when using the site.

sktrdie 6y ago

You’re missing their main goal: having an easier-to-change codebase. Apparently this is way more economically rewarding than performance for Facebook. With that in mind, who cares if the site is slow (btw this is the only complaint of your rant). If the software requires a few devs to change and a few eyes to maintain, they can literally scale as much as they want. And actually now they’re probably in a way better position than they would if they had developed a super performant but unmaintainable site. The quote, premature optimization is the root of all evil, is still very much valid imho.

js2 6y ago

I wonder if they fixed the bug where if you visit the site with Safari on an iPad, when you try to type a comment, every space becomes two spaces. Also, I wonder if paste (command-v) is also randomly blocked at times. I use mbasic.facebook.com as much as possible. Occasionally I'll use m.facebook.com. I've had the mobile apps uninstalled for ages.

lawn 6y ago

> It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers can't make a photo, video, post and message sharing website that is not a pain to use. Too many cooks spoil the stew. I might even go so far to say that 10 engineers would have a larger chance of success than 10k+ engineers.

Impossible 6y ago
This was my experience at Facebook. Attempting things with a small team (or heaven forbid by yourself) was heavily frowned upon because it didn't justify manager and director salaries. As a result you ended up with poorly performing over-engineered code bases that prefered complex, expensive systems that would take multiple teams to build, but for whatever reason complexity that would improve performance was frowned upon. I'm sure this is common at many big tech companies. I didn't work on the mainline FB app but it seemed like part of the culture.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  When were you there, if you don't mind me asking?

EGreg 6y ago

Can you please compare the speed of https://yang2020.app/events https://yang2020.app/events ? On the mobile web or desktop, either one. (We're running it off of one server, it might get the HN effect, we'll see.) We have been building our own, open source social networking platform and we have tried to make a lot of things more efficient while doing so. The site I linked to didn't minify any files or optimize images. However, it loads things on demand as needed, and even lazy-loads entire components. Is it faster than Facebook? We have our own component system, not React. Here is a site that did minify and combine all files: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org And here is the platform we used: https://gitub.com/Qbix/Platform https://gitub.com/Qbix/Platform (warning: not all of it is documented, but enough, at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide).

discreteevent 6y ago
I've never been on Facebook so I can't compare but your site responds pretty quickly for me. Also you left out the h in GitHub in your link so it goes to a domain for sale site.

todd3834 6y ago

At a company I used to work for, we worked so hard to make sure our web app would load extremely fast… just to end up losing the battle with the data and analytics team for analytics scripts. They used a tag manager (tealium) which by itself can be used for good but it ultimately gave the other team the ability to overload our site with 3rd party scripts.

robertoandred 6y ago

Where did you get 2MB from?

x3blah 6y ago

Does the compensation of those "engineers" reflect that they have "failed"? Perhaps there is another way to evaluate the work, not from the perspective of the user waiting in front of a screen. Do not forget that the money to pay the salaries of those who do this work does not come from users.

tim333 6y ago

There's always m.facebook.com if you want a retro experience.