Comments on: Facebook: Sea Cow of the Internet

By: Bookmarks about Elegant

Bookmarks about Elegant — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:00:42 +0000

[...] – bookmarked by 5 members originally found by mrlittlebig on 2008-10-07 Planet Mozilla Interns: Brian Krausz: Facebook: Sea Cow of the… http://nerdlife.net/?p=76 – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by thorstenrehm on 2008-10-05 [...]

By: Paul O’Shannessy

Paul O’Shannessy — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:58:09 +0000

So I think a part of the huge number of files for the “new” Facebook has to do with the fact that they aren’t done developing it yet.

Also, as Jesse pointed out, to the majority of Facebook users, it’s just not important. Most are going to have JS enabled, most are going to be on some sort of broadband. Also, for the most part, those files are a one-time hit. Those files are all on a CDN, so likely have the headers so that they’ll be cached.

So while I agree that they could do a lot to improve there, I don’t think it’s a super necessity. As you point out, they aren’t trying to please everybody. So the majority of users are happy and the tail-end you talk about doesn’t matter as much to them.

Do the same analysis on MySpace and see what happens there. I bet the results are similar.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:30:35 +0000

I know a decent chunk of people who use NoScript and only enable pages when absolutely necessary. I also know people who like to browse full websites (not mobile) from cell phones. And let’s not forget about the accessibility angle, screen readers don’t like JS. Most use cases for disabled JS Facebook is OK to ignore, but they’re basically saying “our site doesn’t work with screen readers, sorry blind people”.

I admit that it’s a very small tail end of their audience, but there really isn’t a whole lot of effort to fixing the problem, and accessibility is something that shouldn’t be ignored.

By: monk.e.boy

monk.e.boy — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:15:46 +0000

Average Joe turns off his javascript ROFL! Have you ever met a ‘real’ person? They are still using IE6 dude, they aren’t turning of JS and expecting Facebook to still work. Oh, man, you are so out of touch with the real world ivory towers etc…

BTW my friends fall into 2 camps, those who have myspace and love it and those who put up with facebook because it is seen as more nerdy (and clever)…. none of them install new browsers.

monk.e.boy

By: schrep

schrep — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:55:44 +0000

Just FYI we upped the max connection limit for Firefox 3 from 2 to 6 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423377)

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:16:39 +0000

Jamie: yes, my second table is for the new site…it’s worse!

By: Jamie MacKinnon

Jamie MacKinnon — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:44:53 +0000

Have you had a chance to test it with the new (www.new.facebook.com) layout yet?

By: Justin Dolske

Justin Dolske — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:20:58 +0000

Oh, the huge manatee!

By: Jesse Farmer

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:52:03 +0000

Conclusion: Issues like page-load time and JavaScript fallback do not matter for most Facebook users.