Facebook has just announced that it’s launching a new photo uploader, which should greatly improve stability but also the performance of the tool. The new tool is being released for testing purposes for the time being and is available in Facebook Prototypes, the social network's testing grounds. The “New Photo Uploader” should be faster and lighter, but the biggest change the users will mostly enjoy is the the fact that they can navigate the site while the photos are being uploaded.

“At Facebook, we're always looking for ways to make sharing more efficient. Today we're announcing a significant upgrade to our Photos product: a new and improved photo uploader that’s available for testing as a Facebook Prototype,” Facebook's Chris Putnam announced.

“Since Photos launched in 2005, the photo-uploading experience on Facebook has relied on the use of a third-party ActiveX control (and its sister Java applet),” he went on explaining the reasoning behind the new tool. “Over the years we have seen a growing number of complaints with this old uploader. In a recent poll, we discovered a significant percentage of users were unable to upload photos due to technical issues. Many more found it functional, but only just.”

It's actually surprising that it took Facebook this long to get to fix the troublesome photo uploader. While photos aren't exactly the first thing that pops to mind when you say Facebook, the social network is actually the biggest photo sharing site on the planet, completely outweighing dedicated services like Photobucket, Flickr, or Picasa. Facebook hosts about 20 billion photos at the time and the number is growing by two billion every month.

For the user, the photo uploader should mean fewer headaches, those uploading a bunch of holiday photos know the frustration, and also a more seamless process. Users can select the photos they want to upload and proceed to browse other sections of the site while the uploader does its job. Another thing users should notice is the new UI which integrates better with Facebook's current design. The UI is also more future proof, only using HTML and CSS making it trivial for Facebook developers to update.

The real work has gone under the hood, though. It's still dependent on Java, but Facebook says the install process is as seamless as possible. For the front end, Facebook stuck to standard web technologies using JavaScript to do the heavy lifting and some of the more fancy stuff for the uploader's UI, like serving thumbnail views of the local files when selecting the photos. Users who aren't afraid of the usual quirks and bugs that come with test versions can start enjoying the photo uploader as it's available in the Prototype section.