Can You Remove the Facebook Timeline? THE TRUTH

During the last week it has become increasingly apparent that there still remains plenty of confusion and controversy about whether Facebook users are able to remove the Facebook timeline, something that is not helped by the constant stream of Facebook pages, applications and websites that claim you can. So here we explain – as simply and concisely as possible – both the truth about removing the Facebook timeline and how people are being confused and misled.

Facebook’s latest profile layout, the Facebook Timeline

The Facebook timeline has not been well received by many. When it first rolled out it was often buggy, often jumping back up when attempting to scroll down, and the most recent posts being displayed to the left and right which many users found unintuitive. It was perhaps inevitable that users were going to be bombarded with claims that they could revert back to the older profile design.

But is it possible to remove the timeline? And go back to the older Facebook design.

The answer depends very much on what you’re looking for and how you interpret the question.

The question we usually receive from our readers is “can you remove the timeline?”. The key word in this question is remove. In this case the answer is no. You cannot remove the timeline. There is no option in the Facebook settings to do that so don’t bother looking. No website, Facebook page, application or anything can remove the timeline. It represents the latest phase in the evolution that is the Facebook experience and Zuckerberg isn’t planning on leaving anyone behind.

Perhaps the more appropriate question you are looking for is can I hide the Facebook timeline from myself, in which case the answer changes to the affirmative.

What we mean by this is that there are options available to a user that lets them alter the way their Internet browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome for example) displays a webpage. These come in the form of browser extensions, which are small programs that “plugin” to your browser that enable it to do things it couldn’t normally do. Browser extensions are powerful tools that can essentially do anything when it comes to displaying a webpage. Since the timelines introduction a handful of popular extensions have come into the limelight, namely FBPurity, TimelineRemove or SocialFixer. HOWEVER these extensions only affect the way your browser on your computer displays a webpage. You haven’t removed the timeline, you’ve just hidden it from yourself. You still have the timeline, but your Internet browser is just masking it from you. It only works for the computer you’re on and the Internet browser you installed the extension on. Anyone visiting your profile will still see the timeline, unless they too have an extension installed.

From FBPurity’s Facebook page, a screenshot of the extension at work. Note the single column format.

Whilst the specific extensions we mentioned above have been around for some time now and appear legitimate it is worth noting that installing browser extensions should not be taken lightly because they can be potentially dangerous and are perfectly capable of installing malware onto a computer amongst other unwanted activities. It is for this reason that we implored our readers not to install the browser extensions that rogue Facebook applications were directing to recently that claimed to remove the timeline. These extensions could have potentially harboured malicious code that could have done any number of malevolent activities on your computer.

If you really want to hide the Facebook timeline from yourself, the ONLY way of doing this is by installing a legitimate browser extension designed to do just that (yes you can get your browser to act like a REALLY old unsupported browser but this is certainly not recommended because this will just be insanely buggy). Generally speaking we don’t really recommend doing it for a number of reasons. For one these extensions are not supported at all by Facebook meaning they may be buggy especially when Facebook updates itself. In fact Facebook doesn’t like these extensions at all (they recently blocked all links to FBPuritys website) especially when you consider many of these extensions are hiding Facebook advertisements – mess with Facebook’s revenue stream and they’re not going to be happy.

So there you have it. You can’t remove the timeline but you can get your computer to hide it from you. So if you really hate the timeline that much then head over to the websites we linked to above – they support all the major browsers. Don’t try and remove the timeline any other way though, because there are plenty of scams out there using timeline removal as bait to lure victims into falling for any number of dangerous scams.

Let us know what you think of the Facebook timeline. Have you gotten used to it yet?