With a dial-up line and a 14 year old Windows 98 PC, accessing Facebook via the URL http://www.facebook.com/ is a pain for me. Compared with Firefox version 3.6.8, the Opera web browser provided some improvement in terms of speed in rendering the Facebook pages. But on the whole, things are still crawling. Disabling the loading of graphic images does not help much. It has more to do with the heavy usage of Javascripts, I believe.
It is a welcome relief when I started accessing Facebook via the Facebook Mobile Site http://m.facebook.com/ on my desktop PC. My experience on Facebook has certainly improved. I have been using this URL instead of http://www.facebook.com for about a week now. With less graphics and Javascripts, the responsiveness of Opera is certainly much better, even when I have 3 other tabs opened simultaneously in Opera - and this is on a Windows 98 PC with 128 MB RAM and AMD 333MHz processor. Also, I do noticed that hard disk activity is significantly less compared to previously.
The user interface design of the Facebook Mobile Site is definitely plain, with not much bells and whistles. But I believe all the functions on Facebook that one normallly use are still there. I think I will be adding more Facebook Pages to my news feeds in the days to come. I could not do much previously as Opera was crawling all the time when loading Facebook.
