This week Facebook started to block the usage of Facebook messages/chats on mobile devices just with the browser – Facebook forces their “products” (=customers) to use their messenger-App (with all the device-rights this app wants…).
A little detour allows to further use FB messages/chat with your mobile browser 🙂
I tried the mobile Facebook-Webpage (https://m.facebook.com/) on my PC and it worked fine – with messages/chat. So it looked like that FB just forces users on mobile devices to use their App. The solution on my mobile was now just a small step. The idea: Mock FB not using a mobile browser :-), so changing the User-Agent may be an idea.
- Install an user-agent switcher add-on on Firefox mobile
- Change the user-agent to sth without android/mobile (I just removed android/mobile in the brackets.
User-agent without any hint using a mobile - Visit m.facebook.com again – messages/chats work fine
It looks like that it’s not a technical background to force users to use the Messenger App – so why ???
Media Links
- https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/03/1428242/facebook-nixes-access-to-chats-outside-of-messenger-walled-garden
- http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/06/ubuntu-phone-facebook-messenger
- https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/06/07/1435231/huge-vulnerabilities-in-facebook-chat-and-messenger-exploitable-with-basic-html