Basic Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Basic Facebook

mbasic.facebook.com

84 pointsSoulMan35 comments

It requires a special kind of engineer and PM to dedicate the time and skill required to make things like this work when most of the rest of the company is working to take advantage of the bleeding edge of technology.

Hats off to that person or team!

This is their mid-quality mobile web version (predominantly for smartphone users with non-native apps), they actively maintain it alongside all of their other platforms (including two other quality mobile web versions for less and greater bandwidth).

I think the mentality is about accessibility, not technology, it's just that a lot of what gets focused on coming out of the company is from the high-tech side.

They also have a "lite" app that can only be installed if you access the Android Play store from an Asian IP or similar.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...

I wonder why they bother segregating it like that though. I would love to give it a spin, as i have found their main app to be hogging the CPU one too many times lately.

You can download the apk and it will work on any phone. So you can either trust somewhere like http://www.apkmirror.com/ or use one of the various methods of ripping the apk from the play store.

I use lite for notifications because my phone has limited space and I find the website to be good enough.

About those notifications, apparently Opera Mini support them now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...

Not sure i am a fan of their new interface though, and it is a proxy browser (pages get pre-processed on a Opera run server).

I think this version of the product makes sense if you're making a mega-mass-market product, which for the web pretty much means Google and Facebook. I doubt it would be worth a Pinterest or even an Airbnb to try to squeeze this much juice out of their product.

Ive been using the basic site ever since I saw since I saw a talk by RMS about the "javascript trap" of unintentially running non-free code in your browser on an otherwise free machine. I have since grown accustomed to it and instead of finding it to be fast, I rather just find the regular site to be horribly slow.

This will work w/o javascript?

Yes. You can use the noscript addon in firefox to be sure. On Android, I use the tinfoil for Facebook app ( Via F-Droid) which additionally blocks a variety of privacy intrusions.

>I saw a talk by RMS

Genuinely curious: why are you using Facebook in the first place?

I am a musician and to some extent need to use Facebook at some minimal level as it is generally expected in my town. RMS made the argument that if you must use kindred services like youtube and Facebook, that you should at the minimum use the javascript free versions.

I was stuck with notifications I can't delete on one of my fanpages and couldn't find any solutions to fix this bug (anyone who has ever tried to find support on FB can easily understand that we're the things in "break things" )

Until I use Facebook with this old UI. It solves this bug right away (Indeed it doesn't solve anything, it works as expected.) So if you have a problem with Facebook maybe you should try this UI.

It's pretty cool how minimal this is. No JS, not even an external CSS file. And it's snappy too. I almost prefer it to the regular Facebook.

There is a trend in video games to rewrite games for old platforms, to get modern functionality using extremely constrained resources (e.g. http://csdb.dk/release/?id=94672 http://csdb.dk/release/?id=114055 http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/10/super-bread-box-preview-c64.ht... ).

Here's hoping that web hipsters will start a similar trend.

How is this different from https://m.facebook.com/ ? (I access them from desktop [edit: Firefox on Windows 8.1] and they look the same)

Weird, the standard mobile site and this basic one are very different for me in Chrome.

This one seems to have much less JS. It looks like the old school static Facebook page.

They both look different on my phone.

Hmmm, should be some user-agent detection.

But on my phone (Windows Phone), https://m.facebook.com looks like https://x.facebook.com and https://touch.facebook.com from desktop while https://mbasic.facebook.com looks like the very basic mobile site.

Previously I own and used a Nokia E-72 (around 2010-2014), and from its default browser it serves this basic kind of Facebook for its m.facebook.com

Seeing blocky buttons made me feel happy for a reason.

Seems like many of the features of the full Facebook are there. I wonder if they are leveraging their React components to render the same stuff on the server...

I'm not quite sure this is necessarily the case - I noticed that on the regular FB site, it has one notification for two friends having a birthday, and yet in this basic version, it claims I have two notifications for the same notification.

Is it the thing for low bandwidth like Africa ect..?

Reminds me of this from 2009:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/facebook-begins-testing-fac...

Wow, that's fast

Wish there was a view that would get rid of the "People you may know" sitting above content I care about.

I've been playing with Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey plugins and using them to tear out content I dislike in facebook. I currently replace Trending/Suggested For you sidebar with random pictures from /r/aww. I'm sure you could do similar things if you cared to.

If you use the tinfoil app on android, it has an option for this mode as well.

Same as m.facebook.com?

No. Visually they're very different.

I can't open the dev console right now, but it appears there's far less JS and "responsive design" on basic mode. m.facebook.com is more dynamic. It's like the Facebook of 2005.

Hmm, Visually in my ff browser they appear identical. And looking at the requested JS, they also appear the same. Odd..

Same here, FF on Linux Mint.

Isn't this the view for older WAP phones?

Is this from Facebook or someone's (very good) hack?

Well since it's at facebook.com, it would be a very good hack if it was not official.

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