Around a year or two ago, I discovered this really cool background app called F.B. Purity.  The app started out innocent enough, giving more control over my feeds at a time when Facebook was attempting to make us all see only what they wanted us to see.  Today, feeds can be totally customized with this program – you can block any post that has any word in it (e.g. “guns” or “election” or “Christmas”) and even eliminate entire sections of Facebook (e.g. the entire right-hand column of miscellaneous bullshit).  When Facebook started Timeline, F.B. Purity updated to eliminate that, too.  Essentially, the entire purpose of the app’s existence is to make Facebook look/feel/function like it did in 2009.  And it works extremely well.

Granted, Facebook wasn’t thrilled about the whole thing.  Obviously, their desire to make their system less functional and more controlling of what its users experience is the opposite of what F.B. Purity was going for in making a browser extension to counteract those changes.  They started by making any attempt to link to http://www.fbpurity.com/ on Facebook impossible: they claim it’s a potentially harmful link and refuse to post it.  When that failed to stop the clear user demand for the product, they outright banned the developer from having a Facebook page.  Google got into the same game, making it so installing 3rd-party apps on Chrome was slightly more difficult to do.  It looks like that may be the end of the F.B. Purity app/extension.

Hopefully not.  F.B. Purity is, without a doubt, the best extension I have running on Chrome (that and AdBlock Plus).  Just in case, it’s probably best to install the F.B. Purity Extension for whatever browsers you use, because it’s really fantastic.