X is replacing its web stack and rolling the new app out country by country
X principal engineer Yagiz Nizipli said on November 4 that the company rebuilt x.com's web app from scratch as a single server that serves people, search crawlers, and link previews alike.
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Yagiz Nizipli @yagiznizipli
The web rewrite is working.
On a slow connection, the old X web took more than 22 seconds to show the first post on a profile. The new X web does it in 2.7 seconds. Here's how we did it, and how we're rolling it out one country at a time.https://t.co/LBUqTnINTa
X principal engineer Yagiz Nizipli said on November 4 that the company rebuilt x.com's web app from scratch as a single server that serves people, search crawlers, and link previews alike. The rebuild took almost six months and has continued with additional performance work since.
On a slow connection, the old X web app took more than 22 seconds to show the first post on a profile; the new version does it in 2.7 seconds. The new app is rolling out to signed-in users country by country rather than all at once.
The rebuild is powered in part by Base UI, which according to Base UI's Colm Tuite now also powers XDS, a new component library used across many of X's web apps.
Why it matters
A ground-up rewrite that slashes load times on slow connections could meaningfully improve access for users outside fast, fixed-broadband markets.
Source: X Engineering