Comments on: Lead Facebook Engineer Recommends Developers Use IFrames for Speed, Convenience

By: 8 More Days of Facebook's FBML | Jennifer Barbee, Inc. Blog - DotCom Confessions

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:13:16 +0000

[...] own tabs, however, it’s apparently going to make life a little easier for most developers. According to a lead Facebook engineer, iframes offer a lot of architectural advantages. Additionally, iframes will be hosted on outside servers, whereas FBML content is hosted on [...]

By: Glenn

Glenn — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 05:32:23 +0000

Check out some codes for using Iframes, drop down menu, invite friends
+
a tutorial on how to integrate an external page on to a tab of your facebook business page.

http://www.facebook.com/webwhispers?v=app_6009294086
(become a fan to check it out – comments all welcome)

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:55:24 +0000

One of the problem I faced with Iframe is the size of the frame on IE6 … I don’t know why but for one user on hundreds it failed with a weird size ….

By: Ken Mickles

Ken Mickles — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:28:41 +0000

First and last argument for me: with iframes you can use jQuery, with FBML, you can’t.

By: Matthew Rudy Jacobs

Matthew Rudy Jacobs — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:37:55 +0000

hmm,
I tried using iframes for an application in December,
and was convinced it was a great idea

UNTIL my client started experiencing loads of errors.

Turns out the default security settings for Safari are that iframes from external domains cannot set cookies,
as such, there’s a whole load of extra work to make a user session persist beyond the initial page.

I’m sure it’s workable though,
but at the time,
it was an unecessary hassle.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:51:55 +0000

thanks for the nice summary justin. one caveat is that a bunch of the new stuff is likely to be a little bit less stable just because its new. for developers starting out who just want to get something working, using FBML canvas pages is going to be more straightforward. also, fb:serverfbml isn’t very optimized right now either, so planning to use that more than occasionally would probably be a bad idea right now.