Instagram is testing a new horizontal feed - The Verge

Instagram has quietly started testing a horizontal feed for some users, a huge sideways shift from the vertically-scrolling user experience that’s been the norm since the app launched. The company had previously been testing the feature back in October, but it seems that it’s rolling it out more widely to users starting today.

The new feed basically turns all posts into a single, giant Instagram story, complete with tapping to advance and a scrolling bar at the top to show you how far you’ve progressed. It’s certainly a jarring change for Instagram’s community, which has grown accustomed to the old feed.

With the horizontal feed, each photo (and each ad) is given the spotlight at any given time — you can only view a single post, and the comments are much more prominent now, appearing with a flick upwards.

It’s also much harder to quickly fly through your feed with the new layout: you can only advance a single post at a time. Another side effect of the new layout is that stories are easier to access, with the bar now always available by swiping down, instead of requiring that you scroll all the way to the top of your feed.

The new horizontal layout seems only to effect the main feed — tap into a user’s individual profile, and things will appear as they always have in the usual, vertically scrolling style.

It seems that the roll out of the new feed may have been an accident on Instagram’s part: only few minutes after the horizontal feed went live, the old-fashioned vertical feed seems to have reappeared for most of the users that had been seeing the horizontally scrolling test. But even if today’s update was an accident, it seems that Instagram is taking the horizontal feed seriously — and it may not be long before it rolls out to devices for good.

Update December 27th, 10:55am: Instagram seems to have reverted users back to the vertical feed.

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