Twitter makes light web version to limit data usage on phones

Twitter has presented a light web version of its site. By shrinking images and video previews, the web version for phones now requires much less data than before and tweets appear faster on the screen.

The web version that Twitter will be online on Thursday put, supports notifications via Chrome and has a mode to save more data by loading images and videos only after the user clicks on them. Users worldwide can use the web version, but it is specifically aimed at users with a limited data connection.

The new site also has an offline mode, allowing users to continue to see tweets that are already loaded when the connection is no longer active. The web client is a progressive web app based on javascript with a node.js server. The site should load 30 percent faster than before. In addition, the web app takes 1 to 3 percent of the storage of users on the phone compared to the app.

To make Twitter Lite faster and lighter in the coming months, Twitter is experimenting with http/2, GraphQL and other ways of compressing images. The site can be reached via mobile.twitter.com.