More than a year after previewing a new interface for its desktop website, Facebook Inc. today made the redesign generally available, allowing users worldwide to upgrade via a button in the settings menu.

Facebook’s stated goal with the upgrade is to make its platform easier to use and faster. The company has shrunk the News Feed and added prominent navigation menus on both sides to help users more quickly jump to the contacts or pages they wish to find.

The left-hand navigation menu features large buttons for bringing up the Facebook Watch on-demand video service, events and a user’s Friends list. Users can also add custom shortcuts to pages and groups. The menu on the other side of the News Feed provides access to settings while doubling as the Messenger panel. 

Not the least of the changes is the addition of a dark mode. Facebook is following in the footsteps of Twitter Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn, which both already offer a similar interface option for their respective platforms. 

Under the hood, Facebook has modernized its site’s code base to support the new interface. “Features like dark mode and saving your place in News Feed had no straightforward technical implementation. We needed to take a step back to rethink our architecture,” Facebook frontend engineers Ashley Watkins and Royi Hagigi detailed in a blog post today.

A key priority of the project was improving page load times for users. To achieve the desired speed-up, Facebook parallelized some of the operations involved in loading content.  “Many web apps need to wait until all their JavaScript is downloaded and executed before fetching data from the server,” Watkins and Hagigi wrote. With Facebook’s new desktop design, in contrast, “as soon as our server receives the request for a page, it can immediately start preparing the necessary data and download it in parallel with the required code.”

Facebook also rebuilt its page loading mechanism around GraphQL, a database tool that allows applications to retrieve only the bare minimum amount of data they need to perform a given task. The effort involved, among other things, developing a custom GraphQL extension to optimize queries. The extension “allows us to send each feed story as soon it’s ready, one by one, with just a single query operation,” the engineers detailed.

While Facebook’s users are gaining a streamlined interface, its developers will benefit from a more standardized code base. The company’s mobile apps already used GraphQL to fetch data before and now its website does too, which should make it easier to roll out future enhancements by eliminating the need to implement them for two different software stacks. 

Image: Facebook