Back the Old Facebook User Interface A Working Trick

Get Back the Old Facebook User Interface
A Working Trick


Facebook made major changes to its user interface earlier this week, and most of the users found it annoying. They are not just annoyed, but also confused on how the new features function. Users were pretty happy and adapted to the previous UI, which was user friendly and easy to use. However, the new changes to the UI has drawn confusions and put things upside down.

Along with the UI changes, came the real-time updates feature called Ticker. The Ticker basically updates every second with new comments, likesand tags made by friends. It is annoying because users don’t really want to know what exactly is happening over Facebook. For instance, I have 700+ friends on Facebook, and I’m not concerned about who my friend adds or whose comment he/she likes.

According to Facebook, the Ticker, on the right-hand side of your account, lets you see all your friends’ activity in real-time. When you hover over an item on ticker, you can see the full story and join the conversation as it happens. Ticker updates itself as stories happen. This gives you a more complete picture of what your friends are doing, right now.

Real-time updates work great with Twitter, but not with Facebook, and I think Facebook should probably stop copyingfeatures from other social networking sites. Although the new features are annoying, there are ways to revert back to the old Facebook UI, and disable the Ticker as well.

You might have come across blogs indicating the trick to get back the old Facebook UI by changing the preferred language to English (UK), and indeed the trick stopped working as Facebook fixed the issue. However, there is still a way to get back the old UI, and interestingly it works in a similar fashion by changing the preferred language.



How to Back Old Facebook Interface

Change the preferred language to a foreign language other than English (US and UK). For instance, I have changed the language to German. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you will immediately be prompted to translatethe page into English.

Before you click on the translate button, click on the Optionsbutton and select Always translate German to English. Now refresh or open Facebook in a new tab, and you will notice that every time you open Facebook, the page will be automatically translated to English. That way you will see the old Facebook interface and the Ticker disabled.

If you’re a Firefox user, try using the Facebook Translate add-on. However, I’ll definitely update this post if I find an alternate solution for Firefox users.