Essay:Fucking sick of fucking Facebook


 * This was originally an SB rant but its size forced me to hide it here.

Okay, okay, so let's get the obvious "stop having sex with a social network site already" out of the way. I'm getting sick of it. But not for the reasons you might expect. Most people seem to jammer on about changes and privacy but, actually, I think the last round of changes were very good. The little top-right widget is cool (I mean, it's real-time updated feed with in-line interaction that doesn't require navigating away from the page, come on, that's awesome) and the new auto-lists and privacy settings streamline the whole privacy cluster fuck quite nicely.

What I am sick of, is the amount of resources it takes up to do all this. It's been my rant du jour for the best part of a month now. I don't get it. The actual information content being exchanged at any one time is only a couple of kilobytes, tops, and even when downloading a picture in high resolution it doesn't go much higher because the compression is deadly. So why ON FUCKING SATAN'S EARTH DOES IT TAKE 650MB OF RESOURCES FOR ME TO EDIT A PHOTO ALBUM!?!?!? Really, I've tried it in different browsers and it all goes the same way. It loads the page and conks out when it goes over 600 Mb. So I've tried to split this album (it's "only" 133 pictures, and I say "only" because the limit is 200) to make it work and it fries every browser I tried. Internet Explorer - pretty much failed at the first hurdle, coughed, spluttered, stopped working. Opera - kinda flicked between "responding" and "not responding" for ages, has trouble then closing without the aid of the task manager. Firefox - generally unresponsive and slow throughout requiring a lot of patience and painstaking clicks to get it anywhere. The only way I managed to do the action of moving the pictures I wanted was to use Firefox and do it one at a fucking time - Firefox being the one that sucked up resources slowest giving me time to do the move action I wanted, but wait too long and BAM, it would die too. Seriously, there is something seriously wrong when you have the task manager open and trying to get everything done before going over the magic number. It's like a suspense thriller "we have to do this before the counter reaches 600!!". It's a fucking joke.

Seriously. I run high end graphics software fairly frequently and even that stuff doesn't do this. Photoshop? Piece of cake. Blender and Lightwave? Yawn, give me something difficult the chip says. The only way I've clapped out my RAM chip is by having more than a million polygons on screen at once. Hell I've ran Gaussian (for hardcore quantum mechanics calculations) on my home PC and it doesn't require that much stuff! Yet here we are, with what is just a glorified MS Access file (if that) and it's taking up most of my computer to even read it. I don't get it. All this "let's do everything through the web browser" is just plain horseshit. These dynamic scripts that are running in the background are just woefully inefficient. If you were to compile what Facebook needs to do into an .exe file and have it just interact with the API you could do much more cool shit, with greater security and greater efficiency. Let's think for a minute what we ask a browser to do at the same time 1) open Facebook 2) play a YouTube video 3) read a Wikipedia article. If we were to run Microsoft Access (why Access? I dunno) and load the biggest motherfucking database in the world, open Windows Media Player and load a goddamn HD film onto it and then launch Word and open a full thesis on it it would consume less processing power and RAM than the browser doing a fraction of those demands. Hell, what we're actually asking of the web probably isn't anything beyond computer processors of 15+ years ago; display some text, a couple of drop down menus, and maybe some text boxes, it's hardly fucking PS3 grade graphics is it? The mind boggles as to what the fuck these people are thinking when they say "hey, let's just do everything online, in fact, let's scrap the concept of an operating system and just use a browser anyway".

If someone can explain what the hell it is that I'm missing here, please tell me. Rant finally off, because I just don't get this.