One big thing they do is cache static assets for you at their edge locations. The majority of the bandwidth costs imposed by static images, CSS and JavaScript (assuming appropriate cache settings) should be offloaded onto CloudFlare once you set it up.
Cloudflare pays for this. They've been sponsoring cdnjs for around a year now.
As for the security of our system, all javascript files are verified against official sources before going on the cdn. Additionally, we have many library maintainers submitting updates to their own libraries.
Beyond that the only question remaining is our personal integrity. Like any relationship with a third party, you're going to have to decide whether trusting us is an acceptable level of risk. If past performance is any indication of integrity, we have had no security incidents since we began in January 2011.
I think you're looking for an inverse relationship.
e.g. My car has 200hp and can do a quarter mile in 20 seconds. If I then increase my car to 400hp (a 100% increase), let's pretend I can now do a quarter mile in 10 seconds.
Thus, a 100% increase in performance drops cuts my quarter mile (or in this case processing) time in half.
This is the greatest revolution in music listening for me in my entire life. I love electronic music and when I'm coding I want my music to flow non-stop. You can't get that with individual tracks.
I can't thank you enough! Props to helping people discover Essential Mixes.
The Facebook timeline acknowledges that many modern displays have more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate. The design reflects this. It uses much larger visual elements (boxes) than a line of text which means it maximizes its use of both vertical real estate and horizontal real estate.
The other thing you're not considering is that Facebook displays more than just text. If you're displaying images inline as well as text, it's going to be more compact if you interpolate each post in a zig-zag fashion rather than making posts vertically serial.
The example you provided doesn't really illustrate why timeline is bad for a website because it's an example provided in a completely different context.
tl;dr Website design is not command line interface design.
cdnjs.com (running on CloudFlare infrastructure) is an alternative to Google's CDN. We should have every major script, but if we're missing anything feel free to fork at https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs and we'll get it up asap.
The CDN used to use the microsoft.com domain name and has been changed to use the aspnetcdn.com domain name. This change was made to increase performance because when a browser referenced the microsoft.com domain it would send any cookies from that domain across the wire with each request. By renaming to a domain name other than microsoft.com performance can be increased by as much to 25%. Note ajax.microsoft.com will continue to function but ajax.aspnetcdn.com is recommended.