Twitter began rolling out its new redesigned desktop website Monday, to mixed reviews.
The new look, according to a blog post from the company, aims to offer a more simplistic experience by relying on one codebase for both desktop and mobile users.
“Many companies have one desktop site and a separate site for mobile web devices,” Twitter said. “This has the advantage of lighter mobile code, which means people on constrained data plans get the core experience they need faster. The downside of this approach is that it requires coding features multiple times, and prevents mobile users from accessing the full functionality of the product.”
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1150812293124546561
The new lightweight design is also accompanied by several prominent changes. For starters, the notification bar will no longer be featured at the top of the page—instead, it will appear on the left side. The notification bar will also no longer include profile information such as your follower count.
Twitter’s “Explore tab,” which shows mobile users what’s trending on the site, will now be included in the sidebar for desktop users as well.
Direct Messages have also been changed. The redesign has made it “so you can see your conversations and send messages all from the same view” as opposed to two separate screens.
Despite the undertaking, which Twitter says was years in the making, the service’s users don’t appear all that enthused. Nearly every comment on Twitter’s profile seems to criticize the company’s decision.
https://twitter.com/falcons_fan1966/status/1150833643046211596
LET ME OUT OF HERE
— Dolan Dark (@DolanDark) July 16, 2019
Some users even began using the hashtag #BringBackLegacyTwitter in protest of the change.
https://twitter.com/SpeedRacer0077/status/1151018464414318593
https://twitter.com/zodSSBM/status/1150916154493415424
Others argued that the new look was ridden with bugs and that the company should be focusing on more pressing issues.
Revert it. You fucked it up again. At times when I want to full screen a video, I get put back to the top of my timeline. Really annoying.
— Calem (@CalemAnnk) July 15, 2019
After 4 years you still couldn’t fix video buffering and quality either. Work on that instead of new UI that is just worse in usability.
https://twitter.com/bazyjonesy/status/1150843887377891330
No update to Twitter would be complete though with at least one user demanding an edit button.
https://twitter.com/mikebreslin815/status/1150915824389165057
Twitter will redesign the entire site and make it ugly, but won’t give us an edit button
— Quig (@Quig) July 16, 2019
Although some users asked whether they could opt-out, Twitter plans to kill off its legacy site once all users have migrated to the new design.
As is with any major change on popular social media sites, users will most likely adapt and stop complaining at some point. Just don’t ever expect to get that edit button.
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