Facebook has a friends-only feed. It just refuses to make it your default.
Buried under "See more" in the left sidebar, Facebook keeps a view called Feeds, with a Friends tab showing only posts from people you're actually connected with, in reverse chronological order. No suggested groups, no recommended pages, no "you might like" filler.
It works well. The catch is that Facebook always reopens on Home, so you have to navigate back to it by hand, every session, forever.
Friendify removes that step. Nothing else.
- Opening
facebook.comtakes you straight to the friends feed - Clicking the Facebook logo inside the app takes you there too
- Every other Facebook URL is untouched — Marketplace, groups, profiles, Messenger, notifications all behave exactly as before
- It does not block ads or hide posts. It changes which view you land on, not what that view contains. If you want ads gone, use uBlock Origin or F.B. Purity alongside it.
- It does not collect, transmit, or store any data. No server, no analytics, no account, no telemetry.
- It does not read page content. No content scripts. It only looks at the address of the tab you're on.
Somewhere along the way, opening Facebook stopped being a way to see what people you know are up to. The default feed is now largely recommendations and ads, and the friends feed survives as an option most people never find.
The gap between "the feature exists" and "the feature is one click away" isn't an accident. An infinite recommendation feed holds more ad inventory than your friends can ever post.
Friendify closes that gap on your own machine. It cannot change what Facebook ranks, what your friends see, or how much anyone posts. It just decides where your browser lands.
Not on the Chrome Web Store. Install it manually:
- Download the latest
friendify-x.y.z.zipfrom Releases, or clone this repo - Unzip it somewhere permanent — Chrome loads it from that folder every
startup, so don't leave it in
~/Downloads - Go to
chrome://extensions - Turn on Developer mode (top right)
- Click Load unpacked and select the folder
Note: on Windows and macOS, Chrome shows a "Disable developer mode extensions" prompt at every startup while any unpacked extension is loaded. That's Chrome's behaviour, not this extension's. On Linux it's quiet.
Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, and other Chromium browsers. Firefox needs a port — see below.
Two mechanisms, because Facebook navigates in two ways.
rules.json — a declarativeNetRequest
ruleset that redirects real page loads of the Facebook root URL before anything
renders, so you never see Home flash past. A second, higher-priority allow
rule stops the target from matching the first rule and looping.
background.js — Facebook is a single-page app. Clicking the home logo calls
history.pushState and issues no new request, so declarativeNetRequest can't
see it. webNavigation.onHistoryStateUpdated catches those. The cost is a full
page reload, which is visible. Fighting Facebook's own router would be faster
and much more fragile.
About 40 lines total. Read all of it before you install it.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
declarativeNetRequest |
Redirect the root URL to the friends feed. Declarative rules only. |
webNavigation |
Detect in-app navigations that issue no request. Scoped to facebook.com. |
*://*.facebook.com/* |
Required to redirect on that host. No content scripts, no page reads. |
The whole thing rests on one URL:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
The day Meta changes that scheme, Friendify silently stops doing anything. If
that happens, open an issue — the fix is a one-line change to the constant in
background.js and the matching URL in rules.json.
Not ported. Firefox's declarativeNetRequest support is narrower, so rules.json
would have to go and both redirect paths move into webNavigation, at the cost
of Home briefly loading before the switch. PRs welcome.
Friendify is an independent, unofficial tool. "Facebook" and "Meta" are trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. This project isn't endorsed by or connected to them in any way.
GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.