What the bloody hell is Google doing with the $5 we're supposed to pay them for review and submission to the Chrome store if they're not catching this stuff? I'm a vociferous Chrome user, but one thing I have to give Mozilla credit for above Google is that their add-on review process is free and quick.<p>The unnecessary cost and additional process (e.g. requiring screenshots) are all reasons LikeBuster (<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/likebuster-for-firefox/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/likebuster-fo...</a>) is available on Mozilla's Firefox add-on site but needs to be manually installed (<a href="http://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster</a>) for Chrome. Knowing that the extra b.s. doesn't actually accomplish anything for user security really grinds my gears as someone who would like to make it as easy as possible for people to download my extension.
Its interesting to me how anti-timeline people are that they're willing to seek out extensions to get rid of it. I'm not sure I understand it, but honestly I don't understand Facebook so much either. Why the hate for timeline from average users? And when would you ever be looking at your own timeline anyway?<p>Disclosure: barracuda pay me to do stuff
I'm a little surprised that after inspecting each plugin and finding:<p>"the first 3 plugins work well and do remove the Timeline after the user logins to Facebook. There is no suspicious activity."<p>that the final conclusion is:<p>"In conclusion, we would like to warn all Facebook users to not try any Facebook Timeline Remover apps or plugins."<p>Why take issue with an unsuspicious app that works as advertised? It's a little unfair to the people who built these apps.<p>Aside from the general privacy concern presented by every single FB / smartphone app which has access to some level of your personal data, it seems like this is being too specific in its claim that "Timeline removal apps are scams."
The funny thing is that people probably think this plugin will revert their timeline back to old facebook profile.<p>Most users I know who dislike Timeline do so because they don't want you to see their timeline, they had no problem viewing other people's timelines.
For people looking to greatly customize the Facebook UI using a non-malicious extension, check out Social Fixer (<a href="http://socialfixer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://socialfixer.com/</a>), previously known as Better Facebook.<p>Among (many) other things, it allows you to switch your timeline to show items in a single column. (Unfortunately, it will not disable timeline completely since the author feels the technique for doing that (pretending to be IE7 since timeline doesn't support it) is fragile.)
Nothing new, a worm similar to this called LilyJade got a few million installs (using crossrider - a cross-browser extension thing) by spamming users facebook effectively bypassing csrf because they can read the webpage and spreading itself and banking the spammers a few hundread thousand dollars with CPA (survey scams - "please do this survey to unlock the content")
I've been using Facebook social fixer (<a href="http://socialfixer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://socialfixer.com/</a>) and it's been great, turns Facebook back into a normal clutter-free experience. Plus, it has a "Friend tracker" which lets you see who've defriended you (vain, I know, but can't help it)
This isn't what I was hoping it to be. I would love to have a browser extension that would iterate through every item, delete it and confirm the delete action. (In preparation for divorcing from Facebook entirely).
Fluff Busting Purity, nee Facebook Purity, aka F B Purity (fbpurity.com) has been keeping my feed free of spam and other garbage for several years now.<p>They've got a feature that removes timeline (from your view, other people will still see your profile as a timeline) that works fairly well. Also, I can change colors, so now my Facebook experience is Zenburned. I really can't recommend these guys enough, and it's too bad Barracuda didn't study them.
The old problem of power vs. security. You can't trust your users will be smart enough to understand "this extension should't access all sites", but you can just block the functionality from all the non-evil developers.