X has rebuilt its web app and says the difference shows most on a slow connection. Open a profile there, and the first post used to take more than 22 seconds to appear; on the new version, X says, it takes 2.7 seconds.
The new version is reaching signed-in users one country at a time, so it will not appear for everyone on the same day. X has not said in what order countries will get it. The logged-out version of x.com already runs on the rewrite, as do the pages that search engines crawl.
The figures come from principal engineer Yagiz Nizipli, who explained the change in an engineering blog post on 4 November. He described the old setup as three separate servers, one each for people using the site, search crawlers and link previews. The new app replaces them with a single server. Nizipli’s post goes into the technical detail of how that consolidation was done.
The first outside impression is positive. According to The Verge, security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who had access to the updated app, wrote that it “feels snappy, loads fast and many parts are polished”. That is one person’s early use, not a benchmark, and the 2.7-second figure is X’s own measurement on a slow connection.
The post describes a web app, so this is about the website in a browser. The sources do not give a date by which every signed-in user will be moved over; until a country is switched, people there stay on the old web app.
