In the interest of reaching each and every one of its 250 million users, Facebook announced a major upgrade to its m.facebook.com page that will make it more accessible from virtually any device.
According to a blog post by Lee Byron on Facebook’s website, the company had previously used multiple versions of mobile Facebook: m.facebook.com for less feature-rich mobile devices and touch.facebook.com for touch devices.
With the new m.facebook.com, users with high-end touch devices will see a “rich touch-friendly interface; for users with feature phones, the site will also look and work great.”
Byron explains that in the past, Facebook had been limited by the lowest common denominator for each site. It couldn’t use JavaScript and had device specific file size limitations on m.facebook.com. Supporting a wide array of touch phones of varying quality on touch.facebook.com limited its ability to use modern CSS and JavaScript APIs.
Additionally, every time the company launched a new feature, it had to build it multiple times across different code bases: once for facebook.com, then again for m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com and in native applications as well.
“Honestly, we weren’t very good at doing this, so certain features were missing on different devices,” Byron admits in his blog.
The new site is powered by a UI framework based on XHP, Javelin and WURFL, a detailed database mapping user agents to device capabilities that allows Facebook to target experiences and features depending on a user’s specific device.