Facebook Freeze

Pretty much since the start of this year, perhaps earlier even, I have noticed that Facebook on Desktop seems to freeze up and crash the browser after about 5 or so minute of regular scrolling and perusing. I’m not doing anything unusual here, and have been a Facebook user from the earliest days with plenty of experience on how things should work - I can’t quite recall it ever performing as poorly as this. First I thought it was my preferred browser - Chrome, but I’ve tried Firefox, IE and Safari and if anything Facebook actually crashes those browsers sooner. I am guessing that something is badly wrong with the content and video pre-load mechanism. On mobile though it all seems to work fine, but there is some memory variable utilised for desktop browsers - possibly a version of JavaScript that is having issues handling memory elegantly. You notice that all of a sudden the page won’t scroll - then you can’t access any of the other tabs in your browser. ’Task Manager’ says ’Running’ but everything is quite obviously frozen, after a couple of minutes you then see the ’Not-Running’ status which it never recovers from - the browser has to be shut down / tasks ended, and then restarted.

I have never been convinced with Chrome’s individual window / tab management, as more often than not when one tab gets impacted by some sort of glitch - they all seem to go. I’ve cleared cache several times and checked that there is no duplicate Flash / Shockwave clash or similar, but it does not seem to be anything specifically to do with my setup - and I see several complaints from others when I Google ’Facebook Freezes’, but none really declaring it an epidemic like I am. I had hoped that something would have been sorted in January, but we’re into February now, and Facebook is still pretty broken on desktop as far as I’m concerned. The only way I can use it is in short burst - so that I exit it before it crashes, but then I have difficulties getting down to the older content in the feed.

I would love to know what is different on the desktop version versus the much smoother running mobile variant. I’m still very surprised to see so much Flash in evidence on the web - I would have thought it should have died out by now - but no, I still get a not infrequent Shockwave crash on Chrome which kills off a window or five.

Facebook is one of my main Music Discovery resources, I am signed up to all my favourite artists - several hundred of them and get constant new music recommendations including of course their own album and single releases. On desktop I can cross-reference triangulate and do interlaced browsing across Spotify, Lastfm. iTunes, Soundcloud, YouTube etc. to check, validate and add tracks to my own collection. This is something which is impossible to do easily and swiftly on mobile as you can’t transition quite so quickly between resources.

Sure there is a more than a gradual move towards mobile, and this is where all the growth is at the moment, yet however good the mobile environment is for inline browsing and quick simple tasks, it is no match for the desktop in terms of a proper research and resource tool. Hopefully Facebook can get back on track soon. It seems they are taking a leaf out of Apple’s ignorant playbook here where they are refusing to recognise the issue or do anything about it in any sort of timely fashion. Apple iTunes is the bane of my life, I know of no other more unreliable and seriously buggy and crappy piece of software, particularly when it comes to syncing music libraries and playlists to iPhone. iTunes still freezes and crashes every now and again, and has totally wrecked my library on numerous occasions and I’ve had to rebuild my circa 500 playlists from scratch on two occasions now. iTunes’ latest wheeze is to randomly activate tracks which have long been unchecked - meaning when you try to sync your iPhone now it tells you that the library is far too large to be synced since it has reactivated numerous albums and tracks which were long since switched off.

I would be happy to pay subscription fees for both services to ensure regular and high quality of service delivery - and no Apple - resetting your device to factory settings and keep having to reload all your music from scratch is not an acceptable solution. I can just imagine telling our customers that yes there may be a bug, but to fix their Affino instance they need to reset to factory settings and upload their whole database again and reconfigure settings!