Social networking giants like Facebook or Twitter are continuously working on the addition of new features to take their user experience another step forward. But, before making features widely available to the global audience, the feature is rolled out to select individuals for testing purposes.
With regards to the same, we would like to highlight a new test feature which has been made available to one of our team members. And this is probably one of the most exciting features to surface on the Facebook desktop platform in a while. This is your first look at the said feature as we haven’t seen any mention of the same on the interwebs as of yet.
The social networking giant is now introducing the option to display news feed posts in tabs at the bottom right of the interface — similar to those for messaging. This feature was discovered off chance while we were looking to delete a post from the timeline. You can open any post that appears in your news feed, timeline or Page in an exclusive tab at the bottom — next to the sidebar. Thus, it means that no matter where the post appears on Facebook, it can be opened in a tab.
The option to open a Facebook post in a new tab is not directly available front and center on the card-style interface. One needs t0 click on the little down-arrow (˅) menu button alongside the title of the post to access the said feature. Under this menu, you’ll witness a new ‘Show in Tab’ option has appeared. Tapping on this button opens the said post in a tabbed window at the bottom, next to open chat windows.
This tabbed functionality has further been augmented to act hand in hand with notifications as well. This is one of the highlights of the said feature and yet again works in a manner similar to the chat window feature. If someone tags you in a post on Facebook, then not only will you see the update in the floating window on the left corner but the said post will open in a new tab on the right. Implementation of this feature is similar to the pop-up that appears when a new message arrives.
Accessing this functionality is mighty simple and gives you a completely new way to keep track of posts you prefer to read later in the news feed. For example, if you’re scrolling through your feed and find an interesting new chicken parmesan recipe that you’d like to try out this evening. Then you can open this post in a tab and minimize it. Once you reach home, you need to expand on the tab, scroll through your feed for latest updates and get to cooking.
The said feature will also come in handy for Page administrators who’d like to track of analytics for any specific post. Just open the post in a tab and keep checking every once in a while to see the number of reactions rise. We then thought that this tabbed post could easily be used as a makeshift picture-in-picture mode. And the end result, no. On clicking, the video instead of playing right inside the tabbed windows opens a known pop-up window to display the content.
Further, there is currently no information on whether this is a test feature or a region-specific slow rollout. Thus, we’ve mailed Facebook for more information about this exciting new feature and will update you once we hear back from them.
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