Why is the Facebook desktop website so bad?

Mobile apps better support their business model:

- Push notifications. Last time I installed the app (to test this) the default notification settings are unreal - literally dozens of push notifications per day. If you change your notification settings in the app to essentially turn off everything Facebook will still send you a few per day as in "Hey, you don't seem to be addicted to the app and use it every hour. Here's a reminder for you to jump back in and get those dopamine hits you're missing." This of course translates to more add views (and potential clicks), more DAUs, etc.

- Greater access to XYZ on mobile. Apple famously cracked down on this a bit but it's still more data.

- Doom scrolling. It's easier for people (and I think they're more conditioned) to swipe endlessly on a mobile device vs scrolling on desktop. Again more add views/clicks, etc.

Meta wants Facebook to die a slow death. Reading between the lines for Zuckerberg's public communications over the last two years, Meta is treating Facebook as a legacy product in maintenance mode. FB is still a cash cow but their social media efforts are focused on Instagram and the long term prospects of the company are focused on VR/AR.

Resource use aside (welcome to modern "web apps", non-basic-HTML Gmail, Jira, and Asana all do the same shit on my machine[s], which sucks because those are all things I'd like to be able to leave open without crippling my computer) I tried to become a Facebook user a little over a decade ago and found it too confusing, so I bounced and never went back. I'm told the UI made way more sense back when it was university-only up to shortly after they opened up registration.

I had similar issues with Twitter. I kinda understand it now after lots of use. Kinda. But it still confuses me, and that's part of why I never tweet and rarely even log in. Just navigating it read-only is difficult, and that's before they throw multiple kinds of LOG IN TO KEEP READING walls at you.

This is not a Facebook specific issue. Take Gmail for instance. This is easily reproducible - open the tab in Safari on the latest macOS. Keep it open for a day. Check memory usage in Activity Monitor. It’s always more than 1GB, I’ve found. Brings my poor 8GB M1 laptop to a crawl.

Why wouldn’t Google fix this obvious issue? Top comment on this thread right now assumes malice of Facebook. I’d prefer an explanation that explains why Gmail is a memory hog too. Maybe it’s just hard to develop complex web apps.

I mean, my bigger concern with facebook website is that I have a 32" monitor, and it focuses content on like the middle 5 inches.

No gridding, no sizing, no custom or alternative layouts, no nothing --> I have no control over layout, either as I browse/use it, or the layout of my page to others. I cannot easily provide photos or music or articles or links or content that I want to friends & family.

I used to be a somewhat prolific poster of content, but over last few years my engagement has dropped to basically nil - I have been dis-incentivized from creating or adding content, and have complete disinterest in consuming content on such an uncontrollable platform.

And yes, I do miss Google Plus, but that's a whole other incendiary discussion :D

I feel like they moved on to the Meatverse because really terrible bugs I reported a year ago still aren't fixed

98.5% of Facebook users access the service from a mobile device: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-f...

Not as featureful, but https://mbasic.facebook.com is an HTML-only version that works okay-ish for scrolling. (Though, no messaging is the biggest omission of mbasic if that is why you want Facebook for.)

It's almost like Facebook (and React in general) was designed at the behest of the memory module manufacturers :D

But no in all seriousness it's crazy that 98.5% of people browse fb via mobile. I have never and will never consume social media via mobile. I literally use my phone for three things -- screening my email inbox, accepting and creating calendar events, and SMS/Slack/Discord comms. Other than that it's just not going to happen for me, ever, unless I have no other choice.

If anyone from FB is reading this, there was a change in mobile website behavior recently that likely had a big adverse economic impact on iOS.

It used to be that if you clicked on an email link ("your friend Bob just posted a new picture"), you'd see the mobile website and then you could click on the left arrow at the top left of the page to go "back" to the home page feed. Someone changed that code so now the left arrow button just does a vanilla browser-back, which does nothing in this case because it's a freshly opened page.

The whole point of those email links is to suck me back into my feed, not just show me what that one singular friend posted. The only way I can find to get "back" to my feed today in that newly launched page is to manually enter the Facebook url in the address bar, which obviously makes me infinitely less likely to get sucked into my feed, see the ads, and make money for the company.

I'm not a fan of FB, but that seems like it's got to be driving a pretty mind boggling drop in email to revenue conversion rates - the real bug isn't the change in the code, it's the failure of the analytics dashboards to spot the revenue loss.

Perhaps half of the RAM and CPU is used to display ads in way that makes them very difficult to block using common ad blockers.

'cause people are addicted and will use it anyway.

Because they want you to use the mobile app.

I've noticed this recently too...the lagging after scrolling. Once you get to some point on the page, it even starts jumping back and forth between images as they load.

That doesn't even bring up the fact that I cannot select a volume for some videos while watching from my PC. It's either muted or fully on. Not only should there be a volume - but the volume you previously selected should be automatically selected when you start the next video (reddit, youtube do this).

Eh. I mean when you boil it down, they need to pack a ton of functionality into a statically served web pages. In order to do this (without having to wait 10 minutes for facebook.com to load), they have to make a ton of [ad] network requests, cache data on your browser, etc.

To be honest, I'd put more of the blame on the browser. They should probably be handling all that activity better. Like chromium browsers will freeze background tabs after a certain amount of time/usage.

Simple answer: that isn’t the way they prefer you doom scroll.

I think most top tech IT shops' dev teams do all their development locally (on huge iron) and don't really take into account latencies over the public internet and this has all kinds of implications for usability, to say nothing of the fact that all the big tech website are almost completely aloof to user preferences and are more interested in tracking usage metrics to feed machine learning telemetry gathering.

I wouldn’t know for I’ve since let my 15y account get hijacked by Facebook due to IP-based phone numbers.

That said, I didn’t use it much because I wasn’t able to view my friendss’ posting on their wall due to crazy preemptive algorithms in favored of paid accounts.

No loss for me there.

I am however thankful for the option to download everything from my account that was provide by Facebook before this clusterfuck occurred.

This is a self-inflicted First World Problem. Delete your Facebook account and it won't matter how shitty the site is.

It works pretty well for me in chrome. Chrome gets "stale" or has issues with memory eventually (as we all know) - I'd be curious if you have issues in Firefox as well. Or maybe it's something wonky with an extension.

I should mention I do have uBO and uBO extras or whatever, it might help cut down on some runaway stuff.

Facebook works great for on my weak Thinkpad. Must be something on your end.

Twitter on the other hand is awful with long load times and heavy resource usage.

Sometimes I'm forced to use an alternative frontend like Nitter to browse tweets.

Javascript was probably invented by Satan.

At least in part it's attempts to defeat ad blockers cause constant attempts to fetch to go back and forth.

These cause non-trivial issues on corporate firewalls a lot of the time.

But yes, the desktop site is garbage. They don't care.

Facebook doesnt have to be good. Their target demographic is old folks who use yahoo and hotmail addresses. They get angry when they cant find the buttons in the spots they are used to.

I am curious, how does this compare to say RAM usage on a smartphone or a tablet browser?

Is the newsfeed leaking mem, or is it just 50GBs over time?

Try adding this to your hosts file...

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com

Works for me as i have zero lag, zero ram used and any scrolling i would have done i do elsewhere.

uBlock Origin and NoScript should reduce the memory load.

Another help is FBPurity.com which is a web browser plug-in that lets you customize your Facebook feed. I have mine set to not show things other people "Like" or "Comment" on. This way I only see things my friends actually post of their own.

It's not meant to be good, it's just meant to spy on you and everyone you know.

Because they don't dogfood their own product.

If you're scrolling facebook for an hour, then you have bigger issues than RAM consumption.

Scrolling for an hour - sounds like you're trying to scrape the site to collect comments with usernames?

In that case, the page gets pretty large because there is actually a lot of content in the DOM. It's just not designed for your use case.

And, just to make that clear, it's a violation of the terms of services and of some national laws (including the GDPR) to collect user data, you may want to tread carefully.