Ever accommodating Facebook prioritizes the News Feed based on your internet connection so that you may receive everything you’re interested in much faster and with less data snatched from your plan.
- Facebook aims to provide quick content for all available types and qualities of internet connectivity
- While reading a post, Facebook will start loading the next one in the background
- They will invest in Progressive JPEG, a photo format that shows a low quality version of the picture before it fully loads
- The data will remain downloaded even after you lose internet connectivity
Technology has made incredible leaps forward. These days, every News Feed on Facebook is filled with auto-playing videos and high-resolution pictures. Not to mention the 20+ photo albums some post for all their friends to see. It makes the app quite costly for limited data plans on mobiles, and could cause trouble for those with slower internet connections.
While plenty of us can take advantage of the 4G LTE connections, Facebook takes into consideration that a majority of the population still runs the 2G or 3G. According to Chris Marra, product manager for the social media giant, they’re now attempting to make sure that people “can load and scroll through News Feed” no matter on which service they run.
Wherever you are and however weak your connection might be, Facebook will work.
Of course, this will come at a cost, in the sense that users with poor internet connectivity will only see the basics. For example, it will load links and status updates, but ignore the data heavy high-resolution photos. This will help it relax the strain on your bandwidth, yet still provide you their services.
According to Marra, Facebook will now also prioritize current content you’re reading, while loading others into the background. This way, any user can pause to read a post, and the next one will have already started preparing for when they will scroll down. This anticipation method underlines the fact that posts will be ready for you by the time you read them.
This will certainly help and prevent users from needing to wait a while the next post loads. There’s nothing that will turn most off a platform more than slow loading time. Facebook acknowledges that and aims to fix it.
The company is also investing in the “best image formats for photo loading”. Facebook is looking into Progressive JPEG formats, as a means to provide low quality pictures while the post is still downloading. It’s of a small size and really poor quality, but it’s better than nothing. Users will be able to see at least some of the image instead of a blank space as it loads.
Facebook has also underlined that the content will remain available even if you’ve lost your internet connection. Whether it’s due to problems or by switching to Airplane mode, the platform will hold on to your content for fast viewing, if it has already loaded earlier. Once you’ve seen it, it’s there to stay.
Image source: adweek.com
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