Fb Like box becomes faster and lighter

If you use the facebook like box in your website, the plugin should now load a little faster than it actually does. That is to say the pages will load a little faster than earlier.

The facebook engineering team states that the new like box is 2-4 times lighter than the original one. The facebook like button loads up in 0.5 seconds, as opposed to 2.3 seconds that it used earlier. Also the size of the new like box has decreased from 245 to 45 kB.

Earlier, Facebook Like box made 24 web requests and would load in 2.4 seconds

Facebook improved the performance of the plugin by switching to inline CSS styles (as opposed to using external stylesheets) and by squeezing multiple scripts into one – the plugin thus has to make fewer web requests.

Facebook Like box now  makes just 13 requests (for photos).

More info on Facebook developers