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Comment by 3PS | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-inte...

The cluster f of the old old facebook interface was beautiful.

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.

For me, it is decidedly slower and clunkier

It's possible both are true: loads faster for newer computers/wider bandwidth, loads slower on older devices

Really? I assume you don't have slack installed on a Mac then eh? What a horrendous piece of shit.

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?

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.

The problem is to install such a distractive application like Slack as an app on your computer. I leave these kind of solutions all in their website so I can control when I want to see messages. So neither accepting desktop notifications. That's nice thing about async messaging solutions, no expectation you respond within in a second.

If they need to talk straight away they can call :)

> They work fine for me.

They generally work fine. They just annihilate battery life and processing capacity while doing so.

I’ve never had any noticeable issues with that, and I’m almost always running and heavily using VS Code and Slack on my Macs.

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.

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.

My guess is that Facebook is popular enough that they are not optimizing for first impression.

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.

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.

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?

> 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".

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.

> 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.

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).

This. Their UX is hostile to browsers, I suppose they make more money due to ads being harder to block in app vs in browser and much more data can be mined as well.

I recommend everyone the old.reddit.com experience while it's still available. There's browser plug-ins that force the subdomain everywhere on reddit

Yeah they sure are driving me to the app. The Apollo app that is.

There are some brain-dead behaviours on Reddit's site. They do a JS render-then-fetch, which is the worst way to load data. They also seem to stick the data fetch inside a requestAnimationFrame, which means it only runs for foregrounded tabs. This is basic stuff. I don't see how this could be an accident.

Angular

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).

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.

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

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.

Do you mean 2007 year CPU constantly throttling because of kilograms of dust on Windows 7 full of malware swapping on HDD?

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.

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

Desktop, for Facebook. I've tried to avoid installing their phone apps for privacy reasons.

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

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.

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