Grokking the Frontend System Design Interview/

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Evaluation and Optimization of Newsfeed System

Evaluation and Optimization of Newsfeed System

Evaluate the NFRs of a newsfeed frontend and explore real-world strategies to meet these requirements.

We'll cover the following...

Nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) are crucial in shaping a system’s performance, usability, and quality. This lesson will cover key NFRs for a frontend system design, including compatibility, performance, and accessibility. When we say cover, we will explore the key strategies or decisions that allow us to meet different NFRs. Let’s get started!

Compatibility

Our design ensures compatibility through multiple strategies. HTTP/2 improves network efficiency with multiplexing and graceful fallback, while REST’s platform-agnostic nature enables seamless communication across devices. Other than that, we can achieve high compatibility using the following considerations:

  • Device compatibility: Frontend systems must adapt to various devices, from desktops to tablets and smartphones. Progressive enhancementProgressive enhancement is a way of building websites and applications based on the idea that you should make your page work with HTML first. Only after this can you add anything else like CSS and JavaScript. ensures a baseline experience for all devices while enabling advanced features on capable hardware. We can ensure device compatibility as follows:

    • Responsiveness: The frontend must use flexible grids, media queries, and fluid layouts to ensure posts, images, and text scale properly across screen sizes. Pagination and infinite scrolling should remain smooth on both small and large displays.

    • Touch and click: The newsfeed must be optimized for touch gestures (swipes for stories, double-tap likes, pull-to-refresh) on mobile while maintaining keyboard and mouse interactions for desktop users.

    • Device-specific optimization: To improve performance, WebP images, adaptive video streaming, and compressed assets should be served to low-powered devices, ensuring smooth media playback and fast loading.

  • Browser compatibility: We can ensure cross-browser compatibility by:

    • Adhering to W3C standards to ensure cross-browser consistency and avoid proprietary browser-specific features.

    • Using transpilers like Babel for JavaScript and PostCSS for CSS to support older browsers.

    • Regularly testing across major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari) to detect and resolve inconsistencies.

Note: A responsive toolbar for the newsfeed should look consistent across browsers while maintaining usability on devices ...