Lot’s of people complain about the new layout, but I guess it’s mostly because it has actually changed. I’m okay with it, since it seems to feed me less irrelevant information and more content deliberately generated by the users.

Anyway, what I’m more interested in is the technical background. The last months, I saw lot’s of instability in Facebook, and it often gave the impression of being next to breaking down because of load. With the redesign, it feels more stable to me. Given that the ‘mobile’ page still seems to be pretty much the same, they still seem to be aggregating the same information, and the difference is just in the front page.

Guess their servers just weren’t able to handle all the ‘live feed’ access for all their users. Maybe they’ll get some database experts to redesign that feature and bring it back; after all it seems one of the things people most miss in the new layout.

P.S. Add this to your user stylesheet to hide some ads:

@-moz-document domain(facebook.com) {
.UIHotStory_Ad { display: none; }
#profile_sidebar_ads, #sidebar_ads { display: none; }
}

And install this small greasemonkey script I wrote to turn the front page into a two-column layout (filters are moved to the right column) that is more efficent in using the screens real estate.