Facebook is rolling out a new addition to its ever increasing new features and its latest feature is rolling out to some users accounts. The new feature, an in-app browser, is reported to to speed up reading and sharing of links found within the social network.
Facebook’s own in-app browser will load the web page of a link you clicked within the Facebook app, rather than requiring you to open your smartphone’s browser such as Chrome or Firefox that you have installed. This in theory means less time having to load an additional app to just share back to Facebook or other social media networks.
As stated the main benefit is speed as the lightweight in-app browser doesn’t need to load any additional assets or launch a whole secondary app. There are of course other benefits to this decision by Facebook as the in-app browser allows you to re-share the link into a new post of your own without the need to back out of the original post. This saves an additional step and time in the end. Selected users also have the options to either copy the link for sharing on their wall or opening the link in your browser of choice should they wish to use their own preferred browser instead.
The one thing that has cause a bit of eyebrow raising is that this new in-app browser has the ability to be turned off altogether in the settings which is very un-Facebook when you think about it, but is a welcome move. This ultimately means that you don’t have to use Facebook’s in-app browser and instead use your own preferred browser on your smartphone.
The new in-app browser does seem to be rolling out to random group of users accounts and it doesn’t seem to be tied to just the beta or stable versions of the Facebook app, so we can’t say when it will become available to everyone. So you will know when you have the new Facebook in-app browser when clicking on any link on your feed or wall within the facebook app.
Have you got the new in-app feature in Facebook? What do you think of it?
I find it hilarious how much hate facebook gets.. they seriously can not do anything with being accused of trying to steal all your data or taking photos and spying on your every move. People have over analyzed the permissions so badly but give all the access in the world to other random apps without batting an eye. And i’m not some facebook lover either. I use all the social networks to be honest, but just so sick of people shooting down good innovation like chat heads. I can see how it can be annoying for some user, but it… Read more »
The new browser is very add happy, it’s always trying to jump to another page while you are on the page you want. Couldn’t read an article because of this reason. Good to know I can turn it off
It’s good that you can turn it off, because it makes no sense for anyone who uses their main browser regularly: it just means you have to keep *two* browsers in RAM which increases the chance of swapping out other apps you are using.
For people who *only* use Facebook, I suppose it makes some sort of sense. But why would Facebook’s browser be any more lightweight than any other?
I refused to update the FB app about a year ago when they started wanting to access a whole bunch of crap they didn’t need and still havent updated.
Yeah totally.. I mean camera access? Come on.. They dont need access to my camera, unless its for me to easily share pictures? Oh wait….
Nah stuff it they are totally spying on everything you do. Facebook is just a subsidiary of the NSA, designed to decrypt your personal life.
I would uninstall facebook and only if you reallly really need to use it, maybe install a text only HTML1 level browser and access the website that way….
That’s actually one thing I am surprised I haven’t, yet, found a copy of for Android.
The text only web browser, Lynx.
Love this feature, much better than opening a whole seperate app.
Disabled about as quickly as I disabled chat heads.
I got it and immediately turned it off. But after giving it another try it does seem a bit more easy on the phone than trying to heat up chrome… at least when chrome wasn’t recently opened…
Whilst I think this is a good call for most users, it’s kinda redundant with link bubble… since with link bubble, you’re not held up waiting for the page to render.