10 ms·

I'm actually really surprised by the number of comments in this thread about how the new redesign is slower. I've had it since yesterday and it genuinely feels

by 3PS 6y ago

I'm actually really surprised by the number of comments in this thread about how the new redesign is slower. I've had it since yesterday and it genuinely feels much faster and more responsive than the old Facebook UI - though, to be fair, that's not a huge accomplishment give that the old UI would take forever to finish painting or respond to input. I'd consider it a success, especially when compared to the disaster that was and continues to be Reddit's redesign.

dhimes 6y ago
Are you using desktop of phone? I've found the desktop quite slow lately- I thought it was probably due to high usage.
- 3PS 6y ago
  Desktop, for Facebook. I've tried to avoid installing their phone apps for privacy reasons.
vbezhenar 6y ago
Yep, works fast for me too. Random profile opens in 2-3 seconds max for me. But for some people websites are slow for some reason. I've heard complains about Gmail loading 30 seconds, while it takes 2-3 seconds cold start for me.
- hetspookjee 6y ago
  I don't understand how you think a 2-3 second load time is "fast" for such an enormous platform and the actual content the user sees. I sure get that Facebook is way more than that, but to think a page loading in 2-3 seconds is fast is something you could've gotten away with in 2000, but in 2020..? I genuinely don't understand why you find it quick.
  - Kinrany 6y ago
    My guess is that Facebook is popular enough that they are not optimizing for first impression.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      That's true, but they (apparently) used to care deeply about how long it took you to post something. They've probably just accepted that consuming is more popular than producing, though.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Almost every fast website works with that speed for me. I'd like microsecond speed, but when there are websites which truly take 10+ seconds to fully load, 2 seconds is fine. I think that for me 5 seconds is when I'm getting a little bit worried about loading speed, less than 5 seconds is acceptable. Hacker news works only a little bit faster. That said, I live in Kazakhstan and my typical ping to EU is 100 ms, so that might make my experience a little bit worse (it's 100 Mbps in theory). May be those who connect to those resources with 1 ms latency are getting much better typical experience, I don't know about that.
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
Try it with a normal computer for normal people, not with your monstrous 'developer machine'.
- Udik 6y ago
  Just tried it on my 2012 $1k laptop. 2s for full page load; about 1s to load up a chat, about 1s to open a friend's profile.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Do you mean 2007 year CPU constantly throttling because of kilograms of dust on Windows 7 full of malware swapping on HDD?
- 3PS 6y ago
  I'm using a 1st gen Surface Book 1. Dual core, 6th gen i7. Not an awful computer but not a monster either. Seeing the other responses in this thread, I think it may have to do more with network bandwidth.
elboru 6y ago
I guess it's optimized for some computers/networks but not for others. Right now I'm in an area without optical fiber so I have to use a 4g modem (12 MBps), I have an old 2013 MacBook Pro and even though my setup is far from being fast, I have no problems with most web pages, some few load kinda slow, but Facebook is in a different category, it's totally unusable, some stuff never even get to load. If I want to check Facebook I have to use Safari (the new theme is not supported in Safari yet).
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  New Reddit and all these JS-based websites are painfully slow for me on Safari on a modern MacBook despite being on an enterprise connection with 1Gbps and a few milliseconds ping to most of Europe. Bandwidth is not the only issue, processing all those megabytes of JS and (poorly) reimplementing browser behaviours in it is the main problem.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Let’s go on this tangent, why is Reddit’s frontend so sluggish and lacking quality of life improvements that should be in place by now? Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back?
- rrdharan 6y ago
  > surely they are hiring world-class devs What makes you think that? Reddit seems like a place where the kind of experienced and talented people needed to turn it around could make a lot more money (via stock grants in addition to salary) and frankly have a lot more impact, at any of FAANG. I've not seen anything to indicate that Reddit is hiring, or trying to hire, "world-class devs".
  - d23 6y ago
    Well first, don't just blame the engineers. The company has to actually prioritize making a functional product. Ultimately, reddit made no attempt to lean into the the thing that might attract world-class people to come there: a passion for the product. Or, at most, any attempts made were surface level. Some of the best engineers I've worked with are at reddit. They just happen to be outnumbered, and some have golden handcuffs on.
- fbthrowaway42 6y ago
  > Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back? Facebook Engineering has a notorious "not invented by me" culture, it's not unique there but a lot of our "world-class" engineers are just acting economically rationally and hole-digging on some new bespoke framework or tool to cement their position in the company. You end up with a massive amount of churn and over-engineered vanity projects, and it's manifesting downstream in basically every product we've turned out for the last five years. That's why the applications bloated and terrible. The joke inside the company is that it used to be "move fast and break things" but now it's "breakfast, vest and move things around". It's really an engineering culture of decadence and waste these days.
- dpau 6y ago
  It's by design. Reddit doesn't want you using the website. They want you to download the app. As numerous annoying popups and notifications will tell you when visiting the website (especially on mobile).
basch 6y ago
Across mobile messenger, messenger.com and the messenger desktop app, the website was the only place left where you could have multiple chats open at once. Now that moves to one at a time as well. That is a huge usability regression (unless its been fixed since last time I tried the prerelease. Edit: Just switched back, it does look like they maintained chat windows at the bottom instead of just chatheads on desktop, although I can still only have two chats open at once.) Friend lists also got left with the legacy interface, which cant bode well for them in the long run. They are still facebooks most squandered opportunity. The neverending quest to reduce information density is a usability disaster, despite the misheld belief that cleanliness = usable. Zooming out on the new fb interface, to restore some information density, leaves a comical amount of whitespace. Wells Fargo has turned its desktop interface into a giant stretched mobile app. Nothing is hyperlinks that support right click or new tab anymore. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-and-you-probably-do-too-edff4a896a83 https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-inte... The cluster f of the old old facebook interface was beautiful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
baddox 6y ago
Considering Facebook engineering has gone into detail about how the new site is much faster and transmits much less JS and CSS, I would be a little surprised if the opposite is true. I tend to not implicitly trust HN comments about things being extremely slow, because for whatever reason there are so many of these complaints I’ve never experienced myself. I still haven’t even had performance problems with Electron apps, and those seem to be widely panned on HN as having abysmal performance. They work fine for me.
- tincholio 6y ago
  For me, it is decidedly slower and clunkier
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  It's possible both are true: loads faster for newer computers/wider bandwidth, loads slower on older devices
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  Really? I assume you don't have slack installed on a Mac then eh? What a horrendous piece of shit.
  - baddox 6y ago
    I’ve had Slack running on multiple Macs for years. I have plenty of complaints about Slack, but none involve performance. What’s the actual complaint? Do people just look at their memory usage and see Slack taking a lot, and if so, is that actually a problem?
    - LunaSea 6y ago
      Slack is incredibly slow by any metric. Startup takes tens of seconds. Typing messages with formatting is visibly sluggish. And in common cases it just crash's and restarts. Memory usage is also an issue if you compare it to the usefulness of Slack. Just communicating with my team shouldn't take 1/5th of my laptop's resources.
kylemh 6y ago
I even used network throttling to do Fast 3G and it's still taking like ~3 seconds at _most_ for everything.
willio58 6y ago
I may be the only one here that thinks Reddit’s new design is fine now. At first, it was buggy and sluggish. Now it is fine.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
It’s karma mining. It’s the same people who think frameworks are dumb and that JS is a terrible language and that codes of conduct are controversial and that you can build FB in a weekend with, at most, ten engineers I really have no clue what they do for a living Anyone who was working in the jQuery days knows exactly why the whole industry moved toward SPAs. It’s disingenuous to say it was just a millennial whim and didn’t fix any problems. It’s a ridiculous argument but everyone’s scared of downvotes
- Glyptodon 6y ago
  jQuery days make me like React, but it's not because I like SPAs, it's because it gives things an intuitive and reusable structure that I can organize and maintain much more effectively and can pretty much be the same server and client side. React is even a comparative pleasure to use for building static sites. I've always assumed SPAs were partially driven by it historically being difficult to combine server side and client side rendering with a single shared code base more than anything - so much of the early stuff ended up in people essentially having to maintain two entire sites between front and back end rather than just one.
- buzzkillington 6y ago
  >I really have no clue what they do for a living Writing code instead of playing with legos?
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    Oh yeah I forgot about the know it all white knights mindlessly defending the hive mind like soldier ants Why do I bug you so much?
- temac 6y ago
  people have diverse experiences -> "I really have no clue what they do for a living" That escalated quickly. I'm not even sure they were not trolls like you seem to think, but having that line of thoughts by default (because you are also unlikely to have any evidence of your theories) is just sad.

by 3PS 6y ago

dhimes 6y ago

Are you using desktop of phone? I've found the desktop quite slow lately- I thought it was probably due to high usage.

3PS 6y ago
Desktop, for Facebook. I've tried to avoid installing their phone apps for privacy reasons.

vbezhenar 6y ago

Yep, works fast for me too. Random profile opens in 2-3 seconds max for me. But for some people websites are slow for some reason. I've heard complains about Gmail loading 30 seconds, while it takes 2-3 seconds cold start for me.

hetspookjee 6y ago
I don't understand how you think a 2-3 second load time is "fast" for such an enormous platform and the actual content the user sees. I sure get that Facebook is way more than that, but to think a page loading in 2-3 seconds is fast is something you could've gotten away with in 2000, but in 2020..? I genuinely don't understand why you find it quick.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  My guess is that Facebook is popular enough that they are not optimizing for first impression.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    That's true, but they (apparently) used to care deeply about how long it took you to post something. They've probably just accepted that consuming is more popular than producing, though.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Almost every fast website works with that speed for me. I'd like microsecond speed, but when there are websites which truly take 10+ seconds to fully load, 2 seconds is fine. I think that for me 5 seconds is when I'm getting a little bit worried about loading speed, less than 5 seconds is acceptable. Hacker news works only a little bit faster. That said, I live in Kazakhstan and my typical ping to EU is 100 ms, so that might make my experience a little bit worse (it's 100 Mbps in theory). May be those who connect to those resources with 1 ms latency are getting much better typical experience, I don't know about that.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

Try it with a normal computer for normal people, not with your monstrous 'developer machine'.

Udik 6y ago
Just tried it on my 2012 $1k laptop. 2s for full page load; about 1s to load up a chat, about 1s to open a friend's profile.
vbezhenar 6y ago
Do you mean 2007 year CPU constantly throttling because of kilograms of dust on Windows 7 full of malware swapping on HDD?
3PS 6y ago
I'm using a 1st gen Surface Book 1. Dual core, 6th gen i7. Not an awful computer but not a monster either. Seeing the other responses in this thread, I think it may have to do more with network bandwidth.

elboru 6y ago

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

Nextgrid 6y ago
New Reddit and all these JS-based websites are painfully slow for me on Safari on a modern MacBook despite being on an enterprise connection with 1Gbps and a few milliseconds ping to most of Europe. Bandwidth is not the only issue, processing all those megabytes of JS and (poorly) reimplementing browser behaviours in it is the main problem.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Let’s go on this tangent, why is Reddit’s frontend so sluggish and lacking quality of life improvements that should be in place by now? Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back?

rrdharan 6y ago
> surely they are hiring world-class devs What makes you think that? Reddit seems like a place where the kind of experienced and talented people needed to turn it around could make a lot more money (via stock grants in addition to salary) and frankly have a lot more impact, at any of FAANG. I've not seen anything to indicate that Reddit is hiring, or trying to hire, "world-class devs".
- d23 6y ago
  Well first, don't just blame the engineers. The company has to actually prioritize making a functional product. Ultimately, reddit made no attempt to lean into the the thing that might attract world-class people to come there: a passion for the product. Or, at most, any attempts made were surface level. Some of the best engineers I've worked with are at reddit. They just happen to be outnumbered, and some have golden handcuffs on.
fbthrowaway42 6y ago
> Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back? Facebook Engineering has a notorious "not invented by me" culture, it's not unique there but a lot of our "world-class" engineers are just acting economically rationally and hole-digging on some new bespoke framework or tool to cement their position in the company. You end up with a massive amount of churn and over-engineered vanity projects, and it's manifesting downstream in basically every product we've turned out for the last five years. That's why the applications bloated and terrible. The joke inside the company is that it used to be "move fast and break things" but now it's "breakfast, vest and move things around". It's really an engineering culture of decadence and waste these days.
dpau 6y ago
It's by design. Reddit doesn't want you using the website. They want you to download the app. As numerous annoying popups and notifications will tell you when visiting the website (especially on mobile).

basch 6y ago

Across mobile messenger, messenger.com and the messenger desktop app, the website was the only place left where you could have multiple chats open at once. Now that moves to one at a time as well. That is a huge usability regression (unless its been fixed since last time I tried the prerelease. Edit: Just switched back, it does look like they maintained chat windows at the bottom instead of just chatheads on desktop, although I can still only have two chats open at once.) Friend lists also got left with the legacy interface, which cant bode well for them in the long run. They are still facebooks most squandered opportunity. The neverending quest to reduce information density is a usability disaster, despite the misheld belief that cleanliness = usable. Zooming out on the new fb interface, to restore some information density, leaves a comical amount of whitespace. Wells Fargo has turned its desktop interface into a giant stretched mobile app. Nothing is hyperlinks that support right click or new tab anymore. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-and-you-probably-do-too-edff4a896a83 https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-inte... The cluster f of the old old facebook interface was beautiful.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

baddox 6y ago

Considering Facebook engineering has gone into detail about how the new site is much faster and transmits much less JS and CSS, I would be a little surprised if the opposite is true. I tend to not implicitly trust HN comments about things being extremely slow, because for whatever reason there are so many of these complaints I’ve never experienced myself. I still haven’t even had performance problems with Electron apps, and those seem to be widely panned on HN as having abysmal performance. They work fine for me.

tincholio 6y ago
For me, it is decidedly slower and clunkier
paulryanrogers 6y ago
It's possible both are true: loads faster for newer computers/wider bandwidth, loads slower on older devices
Zenbit_UX 6y ago
Really? I assume you don't have slack installed on a Mac then eh? What a horrendous piece of shit.
- baddox 6y ago
  I’ve had Slack running on multiple Macs for years. I have plenty of complaints about Slack, but none involve performance. What’s the actual complaint? Do people just look at their memory usage and see Slack taking a lot, and if so, is that actually a problem?
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    Slack is incredibly slow by any metric. Startup takes tens of seconds. Typing messages with formatting is visibly sluggish. And in common cases it just crash's and restarts. Memory usage is also an issue if you compare it to the usefulness of Slack. Just communicating with my team shouldn't take 1/5th of my laptop's resources.

kylemh 6y ago

I even used network throttling to do Fast 3G and it's still taking like ~3 seconds at _most_ for everything.

willio58 6y ago

I may be the only one here that thinks Reddit’s new design is fine now. At first, it was buggy and sluggish. Now it is fine.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

It’s karma mining. It’s the same people who think frameworks are dumb and that JS is a terrible language and that codes of conduct are controversial and that you can build FB in a weekend with, at most, ten engineers I really have no clue what they do for a living Anyone who was working in the jQuery days knows exactly why the whole industry moved toward SPAs. It’s disingenuous to say it was just a millennial whim and didn’t fix any problems. It’s a ridiculous argument but everyone’s scared of downvotes

Glyptodon 6y ago
jQuery days make me like React, but it's not because I like SPAs, it's because it gives things an intuitive and reusable structure that I can organize and maintain much more effectively and can pretty much be the same server and client side. React is even a comparative pleasure to use for building static sites. I've always assumed SPAs were partially driven by it historically being difficult to combine server side and client side rendering with a single shared code base more than anything - so much of the early stuff ended up in people essentially having to maintain two entire sites between front and back end rather than just one.
buzzkillington 6y ago
>I really have no clue what they do for a living Writing code instead of playing with legos?
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Oh yeah I forgot about the know it all white knights mindlessly defending the hive mind like soldier ants Why do I bug you so much?
temac 6y ago
people have diverse experiences -> "I really have no clue what they do for a living" That escalated quickly. I'm not even sure they were not trolls like you seem to think, but having that line of thoughts by default (because you are also unlikely to have any evidence of your theories) is just sad.