If you’ve been using Facebook for a long time (and for more hours in a day than you should), you already know what places you visit and what features you use. But it seems that the social media giant is intent on pushing the ones that they want you to use and so we end up with so many tabs that we don’t even use and visit. Even worse, there are those annoying red notification counts that can be distracting from your Facebook experience. Soon, you’ll be able to control that with new settings.
A TechCrunch article says that they’re noticing an option to remove certain tabs that you may not find useful like Marketplace, Watch, Groups, Events, Friend Requests, News, Gaming, Dating, etc. If you don’t want to remove those tabs, you can just turn off the notification dots. Facebook in fact confirms that there is a new option called Shortcut Bar Settings where you will be able to do these things and it is already rolling out to some users.
This is fulfilling one of Facebook’s promises that they made back in 2018 where they will allow you to customize the navigation bar and not make it the same for everyone since we use the platform differently. But after that initial announcement, it looked like they were more intent on still pushing their agenda on the users rather than letting them pick and choose what to see on their apps. But now finally, you will be able to hide the things that you don’t want to see.
If you already have the Shortcut Bar Settings, tap and hold on any of the shortcuts in your navigation bar and you’ll get a pop-up menu that will let you remove that specific tab. You’ll also get the option to just disable the notification count overlays. Some people just don’t like unread notifications so that should give you peace of mind. You can also go to three-line More tab -> Settings & Privacy -> Settings -> Shortcuts to be able to toggle on/off the specific tabs.
The Shortcut Bar settings has started rolling out to iOS users only for now. A Facebook spokesperson has promised that Android users will also be getting them in the next few weeks.
