Facebook Messenger’s huge update accidentally revealed

App will be re-written to take up less space and launch faster

WhatsApp and Facebook messenger icons are seen on an iPhone in Manchester , Britain March 27, 2017 (Reuters)

Facebook seems to have accidentally revealed the future of Messenger early, publishing a blog post that reveals its plans for the chat app.

The company is set to completely re-write the code of the app as well as making it available on more platforms, the blog post reveals.

Facebook is set to announce changes to all of its social media products at its F8 conference later today. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to give more detail on the company's attempts to stress privacy and security, as part of a plan to deal with the fallout from its various data scandals.

But it appears to have published those announcements earlier, presumably by accident, setting a page detailing them live. It has since been removed again, with the link only showing an error page.

When it was up, the post revealed all of the updates that Facebook plans to bring to its messaging app, showing off both new features as well as the ones it intends to work on in the future.

Chief among them is a complete re-write of the Messenger app, to make it more efficient and use less space. The update version will be more than two-thirds the size of the existing app, the company said, and will launch in just a couple of seconds.

The app will also be coming to desktops, with the launch of versions for Windows and MacOS. That new version is currently being tested and will be launched later this year, Facebook said.

New features will be coming to the existing versions of Facebook Messenger, too. It will have the addition of "Watch Parties", which will allow people to jump into a conversation with friends and all watch a video at once, for instance, discussing it as it plays no matter where people are.

And the app will be entirely end-to-end encrypted by default, the company said. That appears to be part of Facebook's new push towards privacy and security, protecting conversations from anyone trying to read them, including Facebook itself.