Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Instagram is testing a potentially major change to profile pages: making the squares in your profile grid vertical rectangles. Some users recently spotted the test, and there have been indications from at least 2022 that the company has toyed with a rectangular grid.
“The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical,” Mosseri says in an Instagram story from Friday discussing the test. “It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal.”
Mosseri notes that “squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram,” a limitation Instagram removed all the way back in 2015. Mosseri also knows that this profile change might be annoying for…