The new Facebook interface is now available in beta. This new interface is for the website, not for the mobile site. The Facebook mobile app interface hasn’t changed, but Facebook is finally updating its website to modern standards.
Facebook is inviting all its users to try the new interface, and I’ve used it for a few days. If you’re not sure if you want to try it, here’s what you’ll find.
Look and feel
The new interface shown below sports a new font that looks a lot like Calibri, which is the standard font on Windows 10.
Facebook has also joined the dark mode website movement. As someone with migraines, I’m happy to see this so I can relieve stress on my brain as well as my eyes.
By the way, if you love Dark Mode then visit the Dark Reader website. Here you can download and install the Dark Reader plugin for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to view websites in Dark Mode. Some of the websites won’t look very good, but the plugin allows you to change settings for each website.
The menu bar
Within the menu bar, five icons appear in the center. These are similar to what you find in the mobile app. The icons, from left to right, are:
- Home
- Friends
- Watch
- Marketplace
- Groups
The Facebook home button (now in a circle) and the Search box appear on the left. Five icons appear on the right that you can click to access the following features, from left to right:
- View your profile
- Add a profile feature, such as a page or group
- Open Messenger so you can view a list of your message threads
- View notifications
- Open your account settings drop-down menu
The features are mostly the same
Your news feed and the links on either side of it are mostly unchanged. To the left of the news feed, links to shortcuts and sections (including Pages and Groups) appear on the left side. The number of posts in a page or group still appears to the right of the shortcut link.
To the right of the news feed, the Contacts list shows your friends and their chat status. You can see friends who are available to chat by looking at the green dot within the thumbnail-sized profile photo.
If you have any friends with birthdays, that information still appears just above your list of friends so you can wish your friend(s) a happy birthday. Display ads aren’t in the news feed area now — they’re in the upper-right corner of the screen. It’s unclear to me how long each ad appears, but you can still tell Facebook to hide ads.
The news feed looks the same. Five story thumbnails appear in a row at the top of the feed. An arrow appears on top of the thumbnail story image at the right side of the row. Click on this arrow to view all recent Stories.
Finally, there is a New Message icon in the lower-right corner of the screen that lets you write a new private message.
The verdict
As of this writing, the new Facebook interface is still in beta. The news feed doesn’t refresh automatically. The new interface doesn’t recognize when you’ve read all your recent group messages by visiting a group. You can’t edit messages after you’ve written them. And edits to comments take a few minutes to show up.
So, you may still want to stick with the current interface until Facebook works out all the bugs. I’m not going back.