As all of us are getting used to the new Facebook layout, I just realized that the home-page after logging in has reduced in size significantly. Most web-browsers for desktop don’t tell you about the volume of data they have to download to render one page. Actually the size of the page is the sum of the size of text/html, images, animations, sounds and whatever you get to see on the page (and some data you even don’t get to see on the page). It is very important for the mobile phone users to know the size of each page they are surfing. This is because most of the networks charge their users on data-volume basis. That is exactly why my Nokia Browsers show me exactly how much data is being downloaded while it renders the page.
According to my findings, before the new Facebook came up, home-page after logging-in was of the order of 2.5 to 3 MB in volume. I know, the mobile version of Facebook is already pretty cool, but I do like to use the standard desktop version on mobile browser at times, especially when using WI-FI. And to my pleasant surprise, the new version of Facebook shows a home page worth 1.5 to 2 mega byte of size. Obviously it depends on what news, content, notifications and photos are being shown on the home page. That’s why its as low as 1.5 MB at times and grows as high as 2MB. But a reduction in size of the home-page by average 1 megabyte is ammazing!
Now this change actually has a lot to do with performance of the website on the desktop version as well. I know there are so many AJAX calls that keep updating the page and the web-page keeps spending your valuable bandwidth, but still I take it as an advantage. With smaller size, the home-page loads faster first time, and you don’t even have to refresh the home page now. Only the new information is fetched automatically by the AJAX. Moreover, most latest desktop browsers support data compression as well. That makes the home-page loading lightning fast!
Thankyou Facebook!
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