[EthanEtienne]

Yea, I call complete B.S. Look how well the LinkedIn app performs. It's not as good as it could have been if it was 100% native, but it's no where near the bag of rocks the FB app was. I work on native iOS and HTML5 apps every day, HTML5 isn't close to native, but you can still get it to perform damn well enough. FB had no excuse for that shit they released, they should have held onto Joe Hewitt to fix it. (I don't know what the inside story was though).

I read the story on FB newsroom. I see that site is built on OLD asp.net webforms. Not even asp.net MVC. If their devs are constantly using the oldest of tech to create their site, it's no wonder their shit performs so badly.

Now I have no idea or backstory to why they choose these routes, they most probably simply didn't have any developers with enough experience or skill set to use newer better performing tech (I hear it's hard to find good developers).

[wallywax]

The press room site is not their main site, and I believe is not even run by Facebook. Many companies outsource their investor relations and press websites. None of Facebook's primary site is running ASP or anything Windows-related (they use PHP). It's pretty safe to say that none of the people developing Facebook's main site, services and mobile apps are behind the press site...

[eslaught]

Facebook develops their main site in PHP. They even wrote their own PHP compiler[1], and various other pieces of infrastructure (e.g. [2]). I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but compared to other PHP projects I've worked on their infrastructure looks nice and modern.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php

[2]: https://github.com/facebook/xhp

[dlitwak]

I read a venturebeat article on the LinkedIn app, seems like they used some Node.js, a bunch of work arounds and A LOT of domain expertise to get it to work as well as it does. I personally found the article interesting as I'm trying to figure out native vs. HTML5. seems like, barring incredible expertise about the quirks of html/js, native is the way to go.

[evanlong]

LinkedIn app. It sucks. Rotation is clunky and slow.

Do you work on an HTML5 cross platform app everyday like FB engineers did? Guess what. That's when shit gets really tricky and hard.

[EthanEtienne]

That's exactly why you should keep things as simple as possible. Adding features does not mean a better app. Simplicity first, make it USEABLE first.