Facebook has been talking a lot about its new redesign for a while. The company first introduced the new site back in April 2019 and started testing the new design with a small group of users in October.

The company later made the new redesign available to everyone on an opt-in basis back in March and is now making it the default web experience for all Facebook users. The change is being rolled out gradually this week, so if you still don’t have the new experience yet, you can simply opt-in.

The new Facebook experience is a huge change in terms of the look and user experience. The new experience will take a lot of getting used to, but it includes some useful new features. For now, the new site is much faster than before, and there’s even a dark mode.

“We’ve grown since Facebook.com launched 16 years ago. We’ve built new features, optimized for new devices and operating systems, and expanded to hundreds of languages. Recently we’d focused on the mobile Facebook experience, and realized our desktop site had fallen behind. People need it to keep up,” said Facebook.

The new site lays the groundwork for future updates to Facebook, and technologically speaking, it’s a massive achievement. Considering the years of code the company had in the past, the old code increasingly made it harder to maintain the Facebook site when adding new features.

Facebook’s new site, codenamed Comet, is built on the company’s React JavaScript framework. The company’s engineering department detailed the new site’s infrastructure on a blog post, and I would definitely recommend checking it out if you are a front-end engineer.

Tagged with Facebook, Facebook.com, React