Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows
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There are official Facebook and Messenger apps in the Windows Store.
Facebook - Official app in the Microsoft Store
The Facebook app helps you connect with friends, family and communities of people who share your interests. Connecting with your friends and family, as well as discovering new ones, is easy with features such as Groups, Watch and Marketplace.
Made for big screens and close connections. Get access to free* texting, and high-quality voice & video chat built specifically for desktop...
Now Messenger I can understand. I was pissed when Google Talk for desktop was discontinued. I don't want to launch a browser to chat. Native notifications and all.
On the other hand, a Facebook app for desktop? What benefit does it bring to anyone, including possible evil conspiring cyber masterminds, to have a separate app codebase to maintain, that does exactly the same thing that the browser version does, except less of it and slower. Because I could even kind of understand a desktop client if it was truly native and therefore much faster than the browser version.
(Such as Twitter. It's a good client, very fast and does everything for the everyday Twitter user. and psst, no ads https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/twitter/9wzdncrfj140)
But both the Facebook and Messenger apps are based on some emulation based cross-platform solution acquired with a company called Osmeta. AFAICT this runs code written for iOS on Win32. Evidence (note references to WebKit, JavaScriptCore, Centennial):
as well as iOS style popovers and other UI elements.
This multiple levels of indirection (Web content running in Safari running in an emulated iOS in an UWP container on Windows 10?) makes the app very slow. On my older computer it takes 30 seconds to get to the login screen and another 30 to login and load all the homepage content. I hear from people with Windows Phones that the mobile app (probably mostly the same codebase) is as slow or slower. Even though speed would be one of the few advantages of a native app.
So there are at least two instances of mystery here.
- What contrived software stack results in this Frankenstein of an app?
- Who thought this is a good idea and why?
More sweets:
- sometimes the UI horribly breaks, like popovers not disappearing when they should, buttons and text boxes that can't be clicked, layouts falling to pieces (view a Facebook Group for example in maximized app), crucial stuff not visible (event descriptions).
- Once I managed to trigger two entirely different layouts of an event page, one visibly more tailored for mobile.
- Some parts are Ctrl-+ Ctrl-- zoomable, I don't know if that's a bug or a feature but it was only true for some parts of the screen at app release.
- Except when they released the app initially it didn't even start.
- App textboxes are not Windows textboxes but some reimplemented
They didn't even support basic Shift selection a while ago. Some keyboard text operations still do not behave correct but CBA to find out which. - Tab navigation also doesn't work, for example on the login screen.
Bonus: Contextmenu-ception. Click this
Get this
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
So there are at least two instances of mystery here.
- What contrived software stack results in this Frankenstein of an app?
- Who thought this is a good idea and why?
For (2): Marketing at Microsoft. "I gave my Grandma a Surface to play with but she couldn't figure out how to get to Facebook. How much do we have to pay them to make a UWP app?"
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I... uh... um...
I hope @RaceProUK wont mind me borrowing this
for a couple hours...
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@unperverted-vixen said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
For (2): Marketing at Microsoft. "I gave my Grandma a Surface to play with but she couldn't figure out how to get to Facebook. How much do we have to pay them to make a UWP app?"
Nope. There was a previous app for Windows 8, truly native, made my MS in-house.
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@marczellm Are the APIs it uses still around or did Facebook kill them? Wouldn't be the first time they've dropped old ones...
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@unperverted-vixen Deprecated this March. Good point.
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@atazhaia said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
I... uh... um...
I hope @RaceProUK wont mind me borrowing this for a couple hours...So long as you clean it before returning it ;)
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@unperverted-vixen also, they could've just wrapped the web app and called it a day, like Yahoo Mail or Amazon.
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@marczellm It's the Facebook way. Need to make an app? Make a brand new stack by combining 3 or 4 existing ones, then make the app in it.
Why do you think their Android app is a whopping 80MB download?
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@anonymous234 said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@marczellm It's the Facebook way. Need to make an app? Make a brand new stack by combining 3 or 4 existing ones, then make the app in it.
Why do you think their Android app is a whopping 80MB download?
But their iOS app has a custom layout renderer or whatever because of speed. This... not so much.
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Isn't this just another way for Facebook to keep track of what you are doing and where you are going on the web even when you aren't logged in?
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
On the other hand, a Facebook app for desktop? What benefit does it bring to anyone, including possible evil conspiring cyber masterminds, to have a separate app codebase to maintain, that does exactly the same thing that the browser version does, except less of it and slower.
Push integration with the People hub, since they killed off the way Microsoft was using for pull integration. But Project Centennial is definitely not the right way to do it.
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
(Web content running in Safari running in an emulated iOS in an UWP container on Windows 10?)
That is truly fucked up. Does Facebook exclusively hire coding bootcamp grads?
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@aapis said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
Does Facebook exclusively hire coding bootcamp grads?
I think they prefer coding bootcamp dropouts.
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@anonymous234 said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
80MB download?
for a glorified WebView, btw. Can't leave that part out. You can probably get the same effect by pinning the website to your home screen
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@anonymous234 said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@marczellm It's the Facebook way. Need to make an app? Make a brand new stack by combining 3 or 4 existing ones, then make the app in it.
Why do you think their Android app is a whopping 80MB download?
It's only 80mb these days?
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@weng That's just the download. After installation its between 250 and 300 MB.
And you can almost double that if you also use the Messenger app.
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@weng That's just the download. After installation its between 250 and 300 MB.
And you can almost double that if you also use the Messenger app.Ouch. Mine's at 387M(183app/204data). Plus Messenger at 163M (107app/56.15data).
Plus Facebook App Installer 472K(336app/136data) and Facebook App Manager 9.6M(5.77app/3.83data)
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@dcon Holy shit. My main FaceBook app size is shown as 257 (257 MB internal storage used/6.71 MB data) on mine, and Messenger is 221 MB/5.07 MB data. My main app I think is slightly out of date, though, I don't usually bother to update it.
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@weng That's just the download. After installation its between 250 and 300 MB.
And you can almost double that if you also use the Messenger app.Norepro.
Oh wait. Mine is a third party one...
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@sloosecannon Too bad there isn't a good replacement for FaceBook Messenger. Or if there is, I haven't found it.
Also: Cheater! :P
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@sloosecannon Too bad there isn't a good replacement for FaceBook Messenger. Or if there is, I haven't found it.
Also: Cheater! :P
Hangouts used to be good, but Google's in the process of slowly ruining it.
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@pie_flavor Except that no one I know uses it. :P
I meant a replacement for the official Messenger app that still connects to Facebook chats.
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@pie_flavor Except that no one I know uses it. :P
I meant a replacement for the official Messenger app that still connects to Facebook chats.
Frost has one too. It's probably not a full-featured messaging app, but it works.
ETA: It's built into their Facebook client. Which is also actually a WebView, but manages to be about a tenth of the size of the official client and still work better...
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@pie_flavor Except that no one I know uses it. :P
I meant a replacement for the official Messenger app that still connects to Facebook chats.
Everyone with a Google account has it, even if they don't use it; meanwhile, I don't have a Facebook account (that I use for anything other than signing into websites with).
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@erufael said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
I meant a replacement for the official Messenger app that still connects to Facebook chats.
Messenger lite is much smaller and simpler than the original version, but Facebook limits the countries that are allowed to view it in the play store so you might have to sideload it.
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@sloosecannon said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
You can probably get the same effect by pinning the website to your home screen
That's exactly what I do now. Saved several hundred MB of storage and all I miss out on is notifications that I don't care about anyway
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By way of comparison, the iOS 10 App Store says that the (64 -bit? well, an iPh7, so it could be) FB app is 345 MB, and Messenger is 236 MB.
And the FB app is fast and looks more or less like it belongs on iOS.
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@slavdude said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
Isn't this just another way for Facebook to keep track of what you are doing and where you are going on the web even when you aren't logged in?
How would this app accomplish that?
@twelvebaud said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
Push integration with the People hub, since they killed off the way Microsoft was using for pull integration. But Project Centennial is definitely not the right way to do it.
The Facebook app doesn't even want to access contacts. Only Messenger does. But I switched their access off. Do you mean they would suck up all my contacts info to their cloud?
Project Centennial apps can access Win 10 APIs no problem.
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@marczellm The Messenger app wants to suck up all your contacts info to their cloud so that Facebook can get all "People you may know!" on you. The Facebook app wants to push everything it can into the "
what's newTimeline" section of each of your contacts, so that you can tap/click it and get sucked back into Facebook.And yes, Project Centennial apps can access Win10 APIs. That doesn't mean that, if you want to access a Win10 API, you should build a Project Centennial app. A native app, a Phonegap app, or even a webview-in-a-box app would all be more efficient.
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@twelvebaud said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
The Facebook app wants to push everything it can into the "what's new Timeline" section of each of your contacts, so that you can tap/click it and get sucked back into Facebook.
Wow I've never seen that section. Can Facebook write there if it didn't request contacts access? Does it do that for you? Can you show a screenshot?
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@marczellm Company firewall; will try when I get home.
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
Wow I've never seen that section.
I just realized I've literally never opened the "contacts" app in any of my Windows devices for at least a year.
I don't think most people do either. People generally chat on their phones, and their phones run Android.
Suddenly the "people bar" feature that Microsoft is developing makes more sense. If Microsoft can't conquer the phone market, they'll just bring the chat market to the desktop.
https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/HERO-MyPeople-Image-1-1024x576.png
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@marczellm is it actually running the iOS app? I could see the appeal if it meant they could get a Windows app for free by simply plugging the iOS app into that emulator. However, if it's unusably slow and buggy, it sort of defeats the purpose...
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@anotherusername said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
@marczellm is it actually running the iOS app? I could see the appeal if it meant they could get a Windows app for free by simply plugging the iOS app into that emulator. However, if it's unusably slow and buggy, it sort of defeats the purpose...
It's slow and buggy but not unusable. I don't know if there's a way to tell if it's really the iOS app; but it surely looks like one. I rather think that when they need to, they create a snapshot of the iOS code repo, strip out a whole bunch of things, plug it in the emulator, fix some bugs and release.
This app being outside of the mainstream comes with some benefits though. It doesn't update that often. I'm so glad it didn't get Messenger Day yet. (The one that takes space away from the contact list.) They do change the interface around sometimes though, even without app updates. Live code push, or web content, dunno.
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I just attempted to browse my Facebook Page's messages in app. Gradually my computer slowed to a crawl. Task Manager revealed that every time you click something in Page Messages (e. g. Delete message, Archive message, switching folders, or just entering and exiting selection mode), a new Facebook process is started. Which is a browser process because the last one loaded without the CSS all Times New Roman-y. These processes all eat 50 MB of memory on average.
Then I got an error message with a link saying "Back to home". Clicking it took me to the News Feed but with a very different layout. It had a "This website uses cookies" notice on the top.
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If I append one arbitrary additional character to my password in the Facebook app I can still login successfully.
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"Uh oh."
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
If I append one arbitrary additional character to my password in the Facebook app I can still login successfully.
That's standard Facebook behaviour. If your password hash doesn't match they try variations based on common mistakes: initial letter capitalised, caps lock, mangled the keyboard and added an extra letter at the end (possibly the start too)
It reduces password entropy but probably not by that much, and they do store passwords properly hashed
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@levicki said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
The benefit is not meant for you.
Benefits are for FacebookBut that would require that people use it, and for that it would have to be at least a little attractive, no? Instead it's waaay slow and every second feature does not work or is buggy. I'm using it out of curiosity but I can't really imagine there's many users.
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Today the long-dead Windows 10 Facebook app was auto-updated to a PWA version running on Edge Chromium. Even the login credentials are shared, so the state of logged-in-ness is synchronized between Edge and the app. Not a really app-like behaviour.
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@Jaloopa said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
If your password hash doesn't match they try variations based on common mistakes
monsters. This defeats my strategy of having intentional mistakes in my password.
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Two years ago the Messenger app for Windows, which was a custom build of the iOS app running in an emulation layer, was replaced with an Electron app. This was also launched on Mac with custom platform like styling on both OSes.
Today the Messenger app was replaced by a mostly identical looking but way more performant one. Poking around the binary folder shows it's probably finally gone the real UWP route. Context menus are also native UWP ones now.
Performance was spectacularly bad in the Electron one when you scrolled up in conversation history for example. It gradually slowed to an unusable crawl. It's very smooth and seamless in the new one. I didn't understood back then why it has to be that bad, as the browser version did it no problem. How can you write two web apps for the same thing and mess up one so badly is beyond me.
I'll check whether they update the Mac one too. Maybe to a Catalyst based version?
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
I hear from people with Windows Phones
WINDOWS PHONES STILL EXIST???
!also, i thought that fb/messenger shit runs on electron, thanks for the correction
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@marczellm said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
Who thought this is a good idea and why?
you're mistaken in assuming that people nowadays do things for the reason of thinking those things are a good idea.
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@Zerosquare said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
"Uh oh."
ICQ Uh Oh! – 00:04
— Back To Nostalgia
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@sh_code They did then. Their sales ended two months later. I just stopped using mine this year.
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@sh_code said in Mystery of the Facebook apps for Windows:
also, i thought that fb/messenger shit runs on electron, thanks for the correction
Originally it didn't, then it did, now it again doesn't.
The Mac app also feels native, or at least nativer. It also became much faster too.
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If they run it on Electron, wtf was the point of inventing React Native?
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