Facebook is rolling out a new addition to its ever increasing new features and its latest feature is rolling out to some users accounts. The new feature, an in-app browser, is reported to to speed up reading and sharing of links found within the social network.
Facebook’s own in-app browser will load the web page of a link you clicked within the Facebook app, rather than requiring you to open your smartphone’s browser such as Chrome or Firefox that you have installed. This in theory means less time having to load an additional app to just share back to Facebook or other social media networks.
As stated the main benefit is speed as the lightweight in-app browser doesn’t need to load any additional assets or launch a whole secondary app. There are of course other benefits to this decision by Facebook as the in-app browser allows you to re-share the link into a new post of your own without the need to back out of the original post. This saves an additional step and time in the end. Selected users also have the options to either copy the link for sharing on their wall or opening the link in your browser of choice should they wish to use their own preferred browser instead.
The one thing that has cause a bit of eyebrow raising is that this new in-app browser has the ability to be turned off altogether in the settings which is very un-Facebook when you think about it, but is a welcome move. This ultimately means that you don’t have to use Facebook’s in-app browser and instead use your own preferred browser on your smartphone.
The new in-app browser does seem to be rolling out to random group of users accounts and it doesn’t seem to be tied to just the beta or stable versions of the Facebook app, so we can’t say when it will become available to everyone. So you will know when you have the new Facebook in-app browser when clicking on any link on your feed or wall within the facebook app.
Have you got the new in-app feature in Facebook? What do you think of it?
