show only most recent facebook news feed

(Note: I did this in Chrome – it’ll be a little different in other browsers)

I have several complaints about the book of the face – not least of which is that it likes to reset your News Feed from “Most Recent” (aka most useful) to “Top Stories” (aka whatever Facebook wants you to see).

I also like to avoid the fluff off the other columns (ads, games, groups, pages, chat, etc) when all I want is the most recent stream. So, after some searching, fiddling, and tweaking, I now have my news feed (and only my news feed) appear on the side of my screen in chronological order.

How to do what I did:

• install the Auto Refresh extension for Chrome (only if you want the news feed to automatically update)
• go to https://m.facebook.com/home.php?sk=h_chr (this is the mobile Facebook view sorted by chronological order) in a new window (not new tab)
• right-click on the tab holding the mobile Facebook feed, and select Pin Tab
• click the Auto Refresh extension button and select how often you want your feed to refresh, and click Start
• resize the window to a comfortable reading width (mine is about 15% of my screen, or about 3″)
• slide it all the way to one side of your screen or another
• enjoy

There are some other ways to accomplish more-or-less the same thing:

• bookmark the mobile news feed URL
• set the mobile news feed URL as your home page
• sign-in to your Facebook account in more than one browser (instead of having two windows in one browser), and load the mobile edition therein

Hope this helps you like it’s helped me.