Bring Back “Old Facebook” With This Chrome Extension
If you’re a Facebook fan but hate its recent redesign, there’s hope. You can no longer go back to Old Facebook just by clicking a button in the settings menu, but you can install a Chrome extension that magically transforms the site, restoring the look and feel you used to love.
To get started, go to the page with the appropriate name Old Layout and install the extension in your browser. And, yes, the same person who made this extension made the always useful Social Fixer extension , which helps you customize your news feed to drown out content you don’t want to see. Matt Cruz, you’re on fire .
After installing the extension, Facebook should automatically return to its classic look the next time you launch the site. You don’t need to tweak anything to bring that beautiful look back:
As far as how it works, I was surprised to find that “hacking” is actually quite easy. No, the extension doesn’t use a bunch of HTML and CSS magic to revert everything Facebook has updated to its older look. In fact, as Cruz writes:
“This tricks Facebook into giving you the old layout, forcing your browser to pretend to be an older version that their new layout doesn’t support.”
So, if you see any weird browser refresh messages when you browse the boring lives of your quarantined friends, ignore them. Your browser is fine; you just make Facebook think that you are using what you are not using.
There is no guarantee this little trick will work forever, so enjoy your old Facebook while you can. And, yes, you can combine this extension with Social Fixer to keep the old look and clean up the feed of those you hate. This includes all the annoying Facebook sponsored content that eats up valuable real estate on the site and reduces your ability to enjoy watching what your friends are up to.
However, if that’s too much, I suppose you can also use the handy Social Book Post Manager extension to slowly delete your Facebook content before deleting Facebook itself . This sounds like an overreaction to Facebook’s new layout, which even I don’t like, but I think it’s important to consider all the options.