Facebook amateurs

I really surprises me that Facebook, which is supposed to be full of smart developers, can allow themselves to have some simple things done wrong. They never got the back button right. While browsing, all the links open in same window, so when you are in the middle of the very long “wall” page and click on some link, there’s no easy way to get back there - you need to scroll the whole page. So, you need to remember to open all links in new tab or window. The thing that prompted me to write this post is, however, a more serious issue. I was in a middle of a long “wall” page and clicked a link to join a group. Quite a common action, but it uses javascript so you cannot “open in a new tab”. I joined the group, and group page opened. I read a little about it (on group’s main page, without navigating anywhere) and clicked Back to go back to my “wall” What a mistake that was: FB completely stuck my browser, switching back and forth between 2 (or is it 3) pages. I could not press the Stop button (I could, but it does not stop it), nor select another URL from the toolbar. It simply entered an endless loop, and I had to kill Firefox to make it stop. Looks like all the story about FB developers doing it “cool” and “smart” is not really true once you scratch underneath the surface.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2009-11-06