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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Great site and self-deprecating humor. It's funny, but I don't Normally think "great JS" when I think of Facebook's Strengths...its backed and scalability seem quite impressive, but its frontend doesn't stand out in terms of performance (or consistency), but I'm likely not paying enough attention to all the factors that FB's interface has to deal with.

Ironically, this counterintuitive, lets-make-fun-of-other-JS-frameworks-overhyping-themselvs approach has already seeded into my mind, "FB must have awesome JS, remember how they could get away with parodying other JS frameworks?"

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I really hate it when I'm browsing through images (in the pop-up) on a slow connection...

If I move to the next image before the current one finishes loading, the next one will be replaced by the old one when it finishes loading. Really annoying, a very simple thing to fix, but I guess that FB engineers never view their sites on slow connections...

Facebook's client is one of the most buggy pieces of web software I have ever seen, whether on mobile (iOS) or desktop (Windows - Chrome/IE/Firefox):

* pages frequently don't refresh correctly (content is missing)

* changes to your profile take hours to reflect or reflect inconsistently

* stale notifications persist despite reloading (CTRL+F5) a page

* notifications made within the space of 12 hours are listed as a combined notification

* image uploads fail with no way to recover (dialog just sits there) or often take me to an error page (with the album created)

* the timeline places items in weird locations with no way to fix it (changing the date doesn't work consistently)

* chat windows show inconsistent messages between two tabs on the same browser

That's just off the top of my head. Some of these seem to have been fixed, but I'm always running into new problems. (Note: I'm not suggesting it's easy building a site like Facebook.)

* comments sometimes are posted, then disappear, then reappear a short time later.

What makes you think those are client problems and not back-end problems.. Especially things like "changes to your profile take hours to reflect or reflect inconsistently" sounds like back end to me..

A fair point but (a) my observations are still accurate (just scratch 'client') and (b) going off-topic, it makes me question the management structure at Facebook (re: recent post on HN) where they end up building a complicated set of features but can't build the back-end to support it.

I guess you should pay more attention to the software you use. Gmails or Docs have similar problems. They are not so visible though because most people's mailboxes don't exceed 1 GB and Docs is rarely used.

Comparing that to the variety of gadgets and clickables on Facebook's website, the complexity of other Webapps looks like a joke.

Most stuff you mention are issues you see in a lot of heavy-load AJAX-Apps.

"chat windows show inconsistent messages between two tabs on the same browser" That's XMPP, mate.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I said it's one of the most buggy web applications I've ever seen. Maybe your experience differs, but I cannot see how that invalidates my experience.

I don't really understand your point about complexity. It seems contradictory. You're saying other sites have most of these issues but you're also saying Facebook is much more complex without having much more issues. That doesn't make sense, especially since you're also saying you think these issues are common to what you say is a fragile technology stack under these loads (AJAX) and suggesting that it's okay to then add extra "gadgets and clickables" to an already fragile stack.

With respect to your claims about Gmail, my 2 year old Gmail account currently consumes 815MB of storage across ~6K emails. I use Google Docs regularly. I have never seen the issues I listed w.r.t. Facebook on Google services. GTalk works perfectly across multiple platforms simultaneously. I even find www.gmail.com (mobile & desktop) to work better and more reliably than Apple's Mail application on my iPhone. I have never failed to attach a file to a Gmail email; I've also never failed to upload an image to Docs. Facebook's application - mobile iOS, under Safari on iOS, and on Windows - is consistently buggy.

You seem pretty heavily invested in defending Facebook in such a way that you take my observations as personal attacks. Are you currently employed there or have you been employed there by any chance? Or are you a non-native English speaker?

I'm not affiliated to Facebook in any way and non-native English speaker. Sorry if this sounds so offensive, I'm just becoming tired of people complaining about Web-Apps. Probably your problems solve by getting a better computer and a better network connection, or by removing some of your Facebook friends and deactivating Facebook Apps.

When using Gmail at work often, I frequently failed to sent attachments or I had issues with the mail client to load. Others had the same issue. It's always a question how you use applications.

If I understood it correctly, this framework is only used for the mobile site.

I can hardly think of any other well-known website that is more complex than Facebook. Every little screen space is used, you can click anywhere and it has hundreds of millions of users.

Compare the Facebook interface to the Google Interfaces and you know what I mean.

Because google wasn't able to build anything complex with JS, like say, a document editor that synchronises changes across multiple clients.

Technically, Writely built that editor, and Google acquired Writely.

Google Spreadsheets predates the Writely purchase and in any case, that purchase was in 2006, 6 years ago, so almost certainly Google Docs is 2-3 code rewrites past whatever the Writely team wrote.

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