Some testing using Firebug shows the culprits:

1. Images are usually the worst. Thumbnails served from profile.ak.facebook.com or any of the photos-?.ak.facebook.com locations take around 2-5 seconds to download. This is crazy, these files are only around 2-5Kb each. (In fact, that’s even quite large for a thumbnail, they could be made smaller). The slow load times massively affect both the performance and perceived performance of the site.
2. common.js.pkg.php (which clocks in at a whopping 103Kb), takes around 4 seconds to load. The slowest I’ve recorded was 32 seconds, the fastest was half a second.
3. All of the images associated with the Chat app take around 0.4 seconds each to load, though I’ve recorded some that took over 7 seconds and some that never even finished loading.

Now obviously all this happens concurrently, we’re not talking about adding up all these times. Nevertheless, an average page load of my homepage — a few thumbnails, a few notifications — took anywhere between 7 seconds and a whopping 32 seconds to render. That was between 75 and 111 separate server requests and an average of around 420Kb. Not cool.

This testing is completely unscientific and I’ve only done it around 10 times and taken averages, but it really does make me wonder if Facebook give two hoots about optimisation. I’ve been using it for about 8 months and was never impressed with its speed and it’s just become abominable with Chat. So I’m guessing they don’t care for speed too much.

Looking at the source code for a typical Facebook page isn’t any better. It’s a bloody mess and has the worst case of divitis I’ve seen for a long time. The HTML doesn’t validate, and if you turn off JavaScript, most of the clever stuff has no alternate fall-back mechanism, so basic functionality doesn’t even work at all — though to be fair, this is the main problem with web apps and doesn’t look like anyone will solve that any time soon.

I appreciate the Facebook has had phenomenal growth in a short space of time and that any rough development methods they used early on might now be difficult to change; however, they really need to do something about this as it’s becoming a serious problem.

As a conscientious web designer, it makes me both sad and angry to see a big player churning out such a dog’s breakfast of code. I take great pleasure in ensuring that what I build is optimised, fast to load, has no errors and adheres to modern web standards. Did the developers of Facebook somehow miss the Web Standards movement? Do they not care about the end-user experience?

If it stays like this, I’ll probably leave completely and go back to using phones and email to keep in touch with people — that was pretty much all I used it for anyway.

http://www.webleeddesign.com/

Note: Don’t even think about visiting if you use Internet Exploder 6 or lower.

However, I find the most annoying effect is the now ubiquitous ‘peeling sticker’. It’s everywhere, and not just on the web either. I confess I just don’t get it: what’s wrong with those stickers? Do they use cheap glue? Why are you hiding part of your logo with them?

If you need to bring attention to something on your page, there are better ways of doing so. Good information architecture should lead users to the pertinent areas of your page, without the need for replicating real world physicality in your design elements.

Still, if you really want to perpetuate this aesthetic, you don’t even need to do the work yourself. Just get an app to do it for you. *Sigh*.

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

I’m a die hard Folder Fiend and am entrenched in that way of working. I don’t really like the nature of tags as I can’t get an “at a glance” view of what I’ve stored. But I guess I’ll have to get used to them to use an online bookmarking tool.

I’ve signed up to ma.gnolia rather then del.icio.us (just to be different) and will start playing with it. But I’m looking for opinions on both magnolia and delicious. What are your experiences? Which is best? Out of all the other tools, are any better than both of these?

Apparently 37% of parents would be more offended by “a man and woman having sex” compared to 26% disturbed by “a graphically severed human head”. 27% would think the world had ended if a game contained “Two men kissing”.

Obviously this is not a scientific poll and is only indicative. However, it’s really rather silly too. Games have ratings. Sex and violence in games is rated, like movies. It’s right there on the box and the back always has a description of the themes of the content. Any game containing sex and/or violence is likely to be a 15 or 18 and is not suitable for a child anyway. I’m not naïve enough to assume that violent games won’t get into the hands of younger minors, but I’d suggest that if they are, there’s a problem with the parenting in the first place.

(As an aside, I was watching a Will It Blend of Halo 3 the other day and the presenter Tom Dickson discussed playing it with his 4 year old grandchildren. WTF? — it’s rated M for mature, 17 year olds and up. I know that’s probably too high — it’s not as bad as many games — but still…)

The most interesting analysis comes in the user comments, in particular this one caught my eye:

I have to admit, though, the fact that “two men kissing” even made the list just illustrates how fucked we are as a society.

Indeed. And I think it says more about the creators of the poll than anything else.

.”..only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write.”

Wordpress’ Write screen is the core of the software. If this doesn’t work well, it doesn’t matter how many nice new features have been included, you’re gonna have a bad time blogging. So it was encouraging to read about it’s improvments. But rather than improving the experience, they made it worse. Why? In short: Bad use of screen real estate. (more…)

So what’s different between the final 2.5 and the recent release candidate? At first glance, very little, although the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) does now seem to preserve HTML a lot better which was one of my big issues. So, have a look a quick at my overview of the good and bad stuff or head on over to the Wordpress site and grab a copy for yourself.

I’ve downloaded it and have a test install running on my local server. I’ve had a quick play around with it and here’s a few good and bad things that I wanted to comment on:

The good

• Importing from my blog worked flawlessly, picking up all attachments and images and arranging them in the correct upload folders. Sweet!
• Gravatars are now built in
• Uploads management has been completely replaced with a new Media Library section which is a thousand times better. You can now have permalinks for all media too. This is a massive improvement.
• The Blogroll is now named Links and has been moved into the Write section, which makes much more sense.
• You can add media directly to a post with a media-management popup allowing you to browse for files and send the links and/or embed code directly into the post you’re working on.
• Images placed into your posts are automatically given classes for CSS alignment. This is long overdue and very welcome!
• If you use the visual text editor, you can make it full screen, which helps block out distractions while writing. Shame that I still use the code view due to Wordpress’ horrible HTML code rewriting (which doesn’t seem to have improved, though I haven’t extensively tested that yet)
• Some ‘Reading’ settings that were previously hidden in Options have now been sensibly moved to the Reading section
• The admin area can have colour schemes applied using custom CSS which can be selected in the user profile (it took me a while to find that!)

The bad

• Some plugins are now broken, but that was to be expected really.
• The new colour scheme is ghastly and overall the back end still feels a bit clunky. It doesn’t feel like a polished product.
• The write page now has a reduced side bar with most options appearing in collapsible panels beneath the Write window. This is a real waste of space and will mean more scrolling up and down to set things like the page-slug, ping status, etc. This seems an odd decision to have made.
• Still no button for creating nextpage code in your post
• Backend CSS for the admin area is still very messy and there still are not enough CSS hooks for skinning it
• The Plugins page has a very bad default colour scheme that makes it tough to see at a glance which plugins are activated.

These are only few of my observations and I’m sure I’ll find others as I get to grips with it. Overall, this is a great improvement so a big “Well done!” to all involved. I’m currently re-designing my website, so I’m looking forward to using 2.5 to power it.