Facebook today said it has made improvements to how the Newsfeed will behave under poor network conditions. For example, Newsfeed will first load only the story being read by the user, rather than a handful of stories at once. After the first is fully loaded, Newsfeed will then go and begin loading subsequent stories. Facebook said it is using a progressive jpeg format to load low-res renders of photos quickly so at least something is visible while the full file loads. Facebook will now cache previously loaded stories for later reading, too. This way, some stories will be readable even when new stories won't load at all. Facebook said the speed optimizations are being made automatically in the background for most mobile devices.


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