Hate The New Facebook Photo Viewer? Just Remove It!

week, Facebook rolled out a new photo album viewer called TheaterBox, which shows all Facebook photos in a pop-up window with huge, black frames. The advantage of the lightbox is that you don’t leave your current position in the profile or news feed you are viewing by going to another page. The major disadvantage is the completely different photo viewing experience, which is bound to be confusing and/or annoying to millions of people.

But don’t eat your mousepads out of frustration yet. We have a simple solution for those of you who absolutely hate the lightbox.

Here are simple instructions how to kill the “TheaterBox” pop-up window manually:

Go to your browser’s address bar, remove &theaterfrom the end of the URL and hit Enter.

That’s it! There’s your old school photo viewer again.

UPDATE: An even easier solution is to just hit refresh (F5) and it’ll go away. Thanks for the tip, Cocos111!

There are also a few browser plugins and extensions that will automatically remove the &theater bit for you. So far we have found these, but feel free to add your discoveries in the comments to this post:

Google Chrome Extensions:

• No Thanks, Theaterbox: here.
• Facebook Lightbox Killer: here.

Mozilla Firefox Add-on:

• Facebook Lightbox Killer here.

Happy Facebook photo viewing!

How To Edit Your Facebook Comment

Facebook removed the “Comment” button, there was a clear risk of accidentally publishing unfinished comments as users are used to pressing “Enter” to start a new line, instead of using the key to submit their comment. Facebook took note of the concern, and added the option to edit your comment right after you posted it. They also added the instruction: “Press Shift+Enter to start a new line”.

So if you want to edit your message, click the X in the top right corner right after posting it. But be aware that the editing ability will disappear after half a minute, or as soon as somebody else comments after you. If that happens, pressing X will only allow you to remove your entire message.