Facebook Inc

Facebook Photo Theater Killer Gets Rid Of Facebook’s New Photo View Mode

Facebook recently rolled out a new photo viewer which they say “makes it simpler and faster to navigate photos”. The benefit of the new photo viewer is the fact that no new pages are loaded even if the user views multiple photos on Facebook.

Facebook’s new photo viewer has caused quite the controversy among Facebook users with more than 2200 mostly negative comments about it. There are some that like the new style of the photo viewer while the majority does not like its features at all to say it mildly. When there is controversy there is usually a workaround around the next corner.

There are actually a few things that Facebook users can do to get rid of the new photo viewer. From manual workarounds like reloading the web page (hit f5 in the browser) to Ctrl-clicking (or middle-clicking) the photo to open it in a new tab so that the new photo viewer is circumvented to userscripts like the Facebook Photo Theater Killer

he userscript basically replaces the new photo viewer on Facebook with the old viewer that is still accessible. It is however not clear if Facebook will keep the old photo viewer up and running indefinitely. The userscript will break the moment Facebook disables the old photo viewer. For now, it is working perfectly.

The Greasemonkey script for now offers the only automatic solution to prevent the opening of photos in Facebook’s new photo viewer.

The script is compatible with Firefox if the Greasemonkey add-on is installed in the browser and Google Chrome if the Tampermonkey extension has been installed.

Users should see no sign of the new Facebook photo anymore after the script has been installed. Previous versions of the userscript showed the new viewer for a split second before the old photo viewer page was loaded.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox users can download and install the userscript from its Userscripts.org page.

via, gHacks