How to “force” a Timeline Feed in a New Facebook Design
There is a new Facebook, but there is no new timeline of news – not without a little clever hack.
You can test the Facebook redesign right now by opening a browser on your desktop, clicking the dropdown arrow in the upper right corner of the user interface, and choosing “Switch to new Facebook”, for example:
What turns its look into this is if you choose dark mode, that is:
In the left-most sidebar, you used to be able to click the dots next to the news feed to toggle between the curated Facebook feed and the strict timeline of posts. I really like the latter option and would like Facebook to let me use it as the default – alas – and now the company has buried that option in its new design.
If you click on the Learn More link on the left and scroll down to see what seems like timeless, you’ll see the Most Recent option at the very bottom. (Or at least that’s how it was with me the other day; choices have changed a bit since then.)
As mentioned, Facebook doesn’t allow you to use the “Latest” feed by default, so we’ll have to be creative to fix that. The easiest way is to bookmark Facebook in your browser – ideally a toolbar – and make sure she uses this link: https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
When you do this, clicking on a bookmark will always open Facebook in Most Recent mode. Light. But if you don’t want to bookmark because you’re used to typing “facebook.com” into your browser’s address bar, we can do that too.
If you are using Chrome or Firefox , just grab and install the Redirector extension (from any of these links). Once you’ve configured it, click on its icon and select “edit redirects”. The screen that appears looks like this:
You will want to click on Create New Redirect. The next screen may seem a little confusing, but it’s simple. I’ll break it down:
- Description: Name your redirect whatever you want.
- Example URL: just enter good old
facebook.com/. There is nothing more to do here. - Include Template: To make sure all you have to do is type facebook.com into your browser’s address bar, you need to take the example url –
facebook.com/– and put a wildcard in front of it. If you want to go crazy, you can change the example url to “fb”, without quotes, and make the pattern * fb *, which means that all you need to do to access Facebook through your browser’s address bar is is to enter these two letters and press Enter. Your choice! And, yes, the forward slash in the “include pattern” is critical to this process; It took me ages to realize this, so don’t forget about it. - Redirect to: Enter the URL where facebook.com should go to. In this case, it is
https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr - Template Description: Enter whatever you want!
That’s all! You are probably wondering why I didn’t use a wildcard for the whole include template or *facebook.com* . Well, this means that any other Facebook URL you enter in your browser, such as a copied and pasted group link, will immediately redirect to the aforementioned Latest News URL. This is annoying. In this case, we have restricted the rule so that just typing facebook.com in the browser sends you to the new url you want; you can still enter other facebook.com/wesome urls without any problem.
The only caveat to this whole process is that this is a one-time deal. Navigating through the Facebook site and click on the big logo in the top left corner to revisit the news feed will give you a shoddy not a chronological feed. Unfortunately, the extension only catches what you enter in the address bar, not what exists regularly. If I find a better solution for this, I will let you know.