Facebook News Feeds are jam-packed with large photo albums, auto-playing video clips, and art-heavy news sections these days. It makes those for a more appealing social network experience, but for those users only with fast connections.
With that in consideration, Facebook said it will line up News Feeds based on connection speed. Those perusing the service on lightning-fast 4G LTE connections will see every detail, but for those on sluggish connections might only see links, comments, and status updates rather than data-heavy video clips.
Engineering Manager Alex Sourov and Emerging Markets Product Manager Chris Marra wrote in a blog post that what this means on the News Feed group is making sure people can load and scroll through the News Feeds in any form of connection speed.
At the same time, Facebook can now start salvaging more photos and stories while users are looking at the News Feed on sluggish connections. If users are looking at a post while on a bad connectivity, Facebook will start loading other feeds so they will be ready when users start scrolling again.
Facebook stated that the company is also advancing in the best image setups for photo loading by moving to a Progressive JPEG photo layout. This lets Facebook show a low-quality kind of the image until it fully downloads, so users will be able to see some of the image instead of nothing.
The Progressive JPEG preference took off to iOS users earlier this year and is now also accessible on the Android operating system.
In the interim, for those who have lost their connections completely, Facebook will at least let users inspect content that they have already downloaded. Marra and Sourov said that, for example, if users were to open News Feeds while airborne, they would still be able to read stories they have scrolled past before, when they still had connectivity, instead of just watching and waiting for anything to load.
