Facebook is one of the biggest social networks out there, we might even say the biggest one. Facebook is constantly altering their applications, adding and re-arranging stuff, implementing features… and of course their latest move, forcing people to install Facebook Messenger if they want to use Facebook’s chat functionality. We’ve talked about this at length lately, so we’re not going to go into it again. We’ll just remind you that you can use Facebook’s mobile site via your mobile browser in order to keep the chat functionality (it’s not the same, but…) without installing the Messenger application. This time we’re focusing on Facebook’s main application.
It seems like Facebook intends to include a built-in browser in its app. They already started to test the feature by pushing it in form of an update to a certain amount of users, me included. As all of you who use the application know, every time you click a link within the app your default browser application will open and load the webpage for you. This is not exactly the best solution around considering your phone has to load a separate app in order to give you the content you requested. I have used this feature for a short while and it seems to be working just fine. This functionality offers the very basic browser options (and clean look) you’ll need, like copy, paste, back and forward for example. There’s also a drop-down menu in the top right corner which offers Share In New Post, Copy Link, Open with and Save Link options. Don’t worry, you can still open up those links in your default browser by choosing the “Open with…” option or you can just go into the app’s settings and disable the feature altogether, in that case your links will be opened by your default browser app directly.
There’s been talk for some time now that Facebook is working on a built-in browser feature for its app, however that was a while ago so this was a somewhat of a surprise. We still don’t know when or if Facebook will make this feature available for all users, who knows, maybe they’re just testing it to see how will the users react. Knowing Facebook though, we’ll see this pushed to everyone in time. This actually seems like a solid move by Facebook.
