Social Fixer: Customize Your Facebook Experience

We have plenty of reasons to criticize Facebook, but one of the most annoying is its interface. Every time it receives an update, the result is worse than what already existed, while some basic aspects of its desktop version are impossible to modify officially. Any attempt to customize our Facebook experience forces us to add extensions, and one of the most complete is Social Fixer. From elementary adjustments to the most advanced filters, everything is there to bend the social network to our will.

If there is one thing Facebook has learned the hard way, it is that it cannot make radical changes to its interface without facing the fury of its users. The problem is quite simple: its decisions have always been bad. Features that disappear, others that become harder to find… so far, the social network's successes have been relatively few.

And there are pending debts. For example, Facebook doesn't implement batch deletion of posts, and insists that featured stories should be a priority, when many users (including yours truly) prefer to see the most recent stories first. It's absurd that Facebook doesn't allow the switch to recent stories by default, and even more absurd that we have to install an extension to achieve it… but we'll work with what we have.

How to customize your Facebook experience with Social Fixer

This is where Social Fixer comes in. Compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers via script, Social Fixer lets us customize and optimize Facebook with multiple layers of configuration. The most important of these is the General category, where we can set "Most Recent Stories" as the first option. Another interesting detail is the one that modifies the time and date of comments, changing from relative (say, "an hour ago") to absolute.

When it comes to hiding messages, Social Fixer offers a quick blacklist that we must fill with all the words and phrases we want to block. These restrictions can be partial, total, or replaced with an alternative message. The most powerful tool is in the Filters section: Social Fixer comes with several preloaded filters (some have already become outdated, I must admit) that could be very useful. For example, one of the filters focuses entirely on the word "spoiler". If you're planning to watch a movie or are enjoying a series and don't want anything spoiled, this will help.

Social Fixer also enables advanced modifications ranging from completely replacing fonts to hiding hovercards (when you hover over a profile name) and other specific interface elements. Now, it's possible that some users interpret Social Fixer as an overly advanced extension, but experimenting with it isn't difficult. Give it a try, download a copy of the extension, and let Facebook adapt to your tastes, not the other way around.

Official site and download: Click here