3 browser extensions to improve your Facebook experience
Facebook’s population is currently sitting at over a billion users, but despite the seemingly never ending series of changes and updates made to the site, there can always be improvements.
Here are a three browser extensions that add new features or customizations to Facebook that help you get the most out of the social network.
Social Fixer
Social Fixer is the pet project of web developer Matt Kruse, and it adds numerous features and tweaks to Facebook.
“I started working on Social Fixer (formerly known as Better Facebook) in 2009 as a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, because I was annoyed that I couldn’t get rid of posts that I’ve already read and only see the new stuff,” Kruse said. “From there it grew as I added more options and functionality, and released it for public use. I got a lot of feedback and more ideas, and kept building.”
Some of the features included in Social Fixer are:
- Customizable news feed filters
- Option to hide posts that have already been read
- Different themes for the Facebook site
- Ability to hide certain aspects Facebook such as birthday reminders and navigation buttons
- Automatically remove personal information in screenshots
- Improved comments that make it easy to tag replies and quote text
- And much more…
Social Fixer is available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.
Hover Zoom
Hover Zoom is a simple but incredibly useful tool that displays large images simply by hovering over image links or thumbnails. This makes it easy to view friends’ pictures on Facebook without having to open them.
The best part about Hover Zoom? It works on any image link, not just those from Facebook.
Unfortunately, Hover Zoom is only available on Google Chrome, but a similar extension exists on Mozilla Firefox called Thumbnail Zoom Plus.
Facebook Demetricator
Sometimes the stress over likes, comments, and friend counts takes away from the friendly, social aspect of Facebook, which is why artist and composer Benjamin Grosser created Facebook Demetricator.
Demetricator hides all numbers on Facebook. Instead of seeing “X people like this,” users see only “people like this.” The extension also hides the number of comments on a post and the number of friends a user has.
Facebook Demetricator is available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.
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