14 DAY TRIAL // I am not an avid Facebook user, but Better Facebook got me signing into my account after a pretty long time, to see the sort of customizations and improvements it can bring to the original layout. And it looks like this browser extension can do more than merely changing the looks, adding helpful buttons to better manage all the posts.
Even if Google+ continues to gather loads of new users every day, Facebook is still social networking king, its 750 million users database being enough proof. However, many may grow bored at some point with that interface or range of options available.
Better Facebook attempts to change that by offering a complete suite of choices ranging from changing the looks of your wall to fine customization of the way various elements are displayed. The extension can be used with Firefox, Chrome, Opera 11, Greasemonkey and Safari, with no current support for Internet Explorer.
First thing after installation is a setup wizard taking you through no less than 11 configuration steps tackling the most important features. If it seems like a lot for the beginning you can cancel it and manually customize your Facebook page from the “Options” menu integrated next to the Home button, in the upper part of the screen.
The extension can place a control panel at the top of the feed, which puts you in charge of the handling the posts on your wall. In a single click you can mark all the posts as read, hide or show them or mute all comments. If the message flow is rather rich this makes for an awesome addition to your Facebook account.
Tab support for segregating messages from different applications or friends is another feature most users could find very useful. Through its filtering function Better Facebook can redirect a message to be available in a specific tab, thus helping you manage the input in a more comfortable fashion.
For text received from friends the filtering options are quite a handful as the extension differentiates between subjects ranging from comments on photos, joining groups, or playing games to notes, change of profile information, questions asked/answered or posts to your wall. Filtering possibilities go further, though, allowing the separation of specific text string into tabs.
On the downside, although the options are pretty much intuitive, it will take a while to understand how tabs and filtering work; especially since the documentation does not offer minute details of the steps you have to take to achieve your purpose.
A rather large group of users did not agree with the lightbox photo viewer upon its implementation; refreshing the page to check the images in the old layout would not be an option in many cases since moving to a different album would re-enable lightbox view.
The default Facebook looks is also subject to change with this browser plugin. There aren’t too many choices to pick from, and some of them are not too great, but you have the possibility to customize your page with one of the 8 themes available, but the list is still open to new entries.
Enabling a theme is a click away. With previewing them you get the same deal: a click and the entire Facebook page turns to the color you picked; unless you save the changes nothing will be applied, and the default view is also present, so you can revert to the original view any time you want.
Among other benefits of Better Facebook we can count the Friend Tracker and Friend Activity notifications. The first one is designed to issue notifications when you get unfriended while the other monitors the profile details of your friends and informs about any alteration.
From what we’ve seen during our testing the same behavior as in the original environment is shown, so you can safely post a message to a group of friends and hide it from all the rest. There is a downside, though: accessing the function is not too comfortable, or at least we could not find an easy way to use it neither during testing nor in the documentation.
Although it may look like a good thing that Better Facebook is jam-packed with options of all kinds, some users could discard it as too much of a hassle to configure. It takes a while to go through all the choices it makes available and for a novice this may be nothing but a drawback; especially since Facebook itself has been designed to be handled as easy as possible.
On the other hand, users spending most of their online time on Facebook and those using it as the main source for information will find a handy utility in Better Facebook. The browser plugin offers an extremely detailed level of control over your FB page and the way all the messages are organized and pictures are displayed. It can practically change the entire layout of the page and the options at hand.
The Good
Although looks are not forgotten and there are multiple themes to choose from, the extension focuses more on functionality, with rich choices as far as display of various page elements are concerned.
Filtering is pretty important if you want specific information to be easily available whenever changes occur with friends or applications.
The Bad
There aren’t too many themes available at the moment. Filtering is an awesome function, but configuring it can give the average Facebook user a pretty hard time.
We found working with Friend Circles to be a very cumbersome activity since we were not able to send the same text to multiple recipients at once. Lack of thorough explanations regarding usage of the feature in the help file contributed to this, too.
The Truth
On the downside there is the overwhelming (for the regular user) number of options and customization possibilities available; this may draw users away from it, especially since Facebook itself has been built around a simple and light layout.
