

Basic Facebook - SoulMan
https://mbasic.facebook.com/home.php

======
davidu
It requires a special kind of engineer and PM to dedicate the time and skill
required to make things like this work when most of the rest of the company is
working to take advantage of the bleeding edge of technology.

Hats off to that person or team!

~~~
iaw
This is their mid-quality mobile web version (predominantly for smartphone
users with non-native apps), they actively maintain it alongside all of their
other platforms (including two other quality mobile web versions for less and
greater bandwidth).

I think the mentality is about accessibility, not technology, it's just that a
lot of what gets focused on coming out of the company is from the high-tech
side.

~~~
digi_owl
They also have a "lite" app that can only be installed if you access the
Android Play store from an Asian IP or similar.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.lite)

I wonder why they bother segregating it like that though. I would love to give
it a spin, as i have found their main app to be hogging the CPU one too many
times lately.

~~~
glomph
You can download the apk and it will work on any phone. So you can either
trust somewhere like [http://www.apkmirror.com/](http://www.apkmirror.com/) or
use one of the various methods of ripping the apk from the play store.

I use lite for notifications because my phone has limited space and I find the
website to be good enough.

~~~
digi_owl
About those notifications, apparently Opera Mini support them now.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini.native)

Not sure i am a fan of their new interface though, and it is a proxy browser
(pages get pre-processed on a Opera run server).

------
em3rgent0rdr
Ive been using the basic site ever since I saw since I saw a talk by RMS about
the "javascript trap" of unintentially running non-free code in your browser
on an otherwise free machine. I have since grown accustomed to it and instead
of finding it to be fast, I rather just find the regular site to be horribly
slow.

~~~
pervycreeper
>I saw a talk by RMS

Genuinely curious: why are you using Facebook in the first place?

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
I am a musician and to some extent need to use Facebook at some minimal level
as it is generally expected in my town. RMS made the argument that if you must
use kindred services like youtube and Facebook, that you should at the minimum
use the javascript free versions.

------
tangue
I was stuck with notifications I can't delete on one of my fanpages and
couldn't find any solutions to fix this bug (anyone who has ever tried to find
support on FB can easily understand that we're the things in "break things" )

Until I use Facebook with this old UI. It solves this bug right away ( _Indeed
it doesn 't solve anything, it works as expected._) So if you have a problem
with Facebook maybe you should try this UI.

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sebular
It's pretty cool how minimal this is. No JS, not even an external CSS file.
And it's snappy too. I almost prefer it to the regular Facebook.

------
pervycreeper
There is a trend in video games to rewrite games for old platforms, to get
modern functionality using extremely constrained resources (e.g.
[http://csdb.dk/release/?id=94672](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=94672)
[http://csdb.dk/release/?id=114055](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=114055)
[http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/10/super-bread-box-
preview-c64.ht...](http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/10/super-bread-box-
preview-c64.html) ).

Here's hoping that web hipsters will start a similar trend.

------
kenrick95
How is this different from [https://m.facebook.com/](https://m.facebook.com/)
? (I access them from desktop [edit: Firefox on Windows 8.1] and they look the
same)

~~~
orbitur
Weird, the standard mobile site and this basic one are very different for me
in Chrome.

This one seems to have much less JS. It looks like the old school static
Facebook page.

------
agumonkey
Seeing blocky buttons made me feel happy for a reason.

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jbish
Seems like many of the features of the full Facebook are there. I wonder if
they are leveraging their React components to render the same stuff on the
server...

~~~
Bahamut
I'm not quite sure this is necessarily the case - I noticed that on the
regular FB site, it has one notification for two friends having a birthday,
and yet in this basic version, it claims I have two notifications for the same
notification.

------
Thaxll
Is it the thing for low bandwidth like Africa ect..?

------
coob
Reminds me of this from 2009:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/facebook-begins-testing-
fac...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/facebook-begins-testing-facebook-
lite-a-faster-simpler-version-of-the-service/)

------
neals
Wow, that's fast

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freehunter
Wish there was a view that would get rid of the "People you may know" sitting
above content I care about.

~~~
TheCapn
I've been playing with Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey plugins and using them to
tear out content I dislike in facebook. I currently replace Trending/Suggested
For you sidebar with random pictures from /r/aww. I'm sure you could do
similar things if you cared to.

------
burntcookie90
If you use the tinfoil app on android, it has an option for this mode as well.

------
edgarvaldes
Same as m.facebook.com?

~~~
orbitur
No. Visually they're very different.

I can't open the dev console right now, but it appears there's far less JS and
"responsive design" on basic mode. m.facebook.com is more dynamic. It's like
the Facebook of 2005.

~~~
chippy
Hmm, Visually in my ff browser they appear identical. And looking at the
requested JS, they also appear the same. Odd..

~~~
edgarvaldes
Same here, FF on Linux Mint.

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snx
Isn't this the view for older WAP phones?

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mrcactu5
Is this from Facebook or someone's (very good) hack?

~~~
freehunter
Well since it's at facebook.com, it would be a _very_ good hack if it was not
official.

