Facebook Launches New Mobile Website

Facebook has announced that it is rolling out an upgraded version of its mobile website, which it believes will bring the best mobile web experience to mobile devices.

Prior to this, Facebook had two websites: m.facebook.com for less feature-rich mobile devices, while touch.facebook.com was for touch based smartphones like iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Facebook will merging the two websites (into m.facebook.com) to reduce the confusion and to also make it easier to develop and rollout new features.

Lee Byron, Head of Mobile Products at Facebook explains that the problems with their earlier approach:

1. We were limited by the lowest common denominator for each site. We 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 our ability to use modern CSS and JavaScript APIs.
2. Every time we launched a new feature, we 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.

By unifying the websites, it will make it easier and faster for Facebook to develop new features. Bryon explains:

This mobile UI framework allows engineers to focus on building their product and not on supporting device edge cases. Rather than directly writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, our product engineers write XHP and use these mobile components to build new features.

So when users of smartphones like iPhone visit the new m.facebook.com website, they will see the rich touch friendly user interface while users with feature phones will see the less feature rich website.

Facebook’s native iPhone app is one of the most popular apps in the App Store but Facebook is yet to release an iPad app. It remains to be seen if Facebook will ditch its native iPhone app and focus on developing new features for the mobile web app.

You can checkout the new Facebook website for mobile by pointing your iDevice to m.facebook.com. Please note that Facebook has mentioned that the new m.facebook.com will be rolled out to everyone in the next few weeks.

Do you prefer a native iPhone app or the iPhone web app for Facebook? Please share your views in the comments below.