Disable Facebook’s theatre mode
You have probably been aware of Facebook’s “theatre mode” for viewing images since the last features upgrade about 2 months back. While I admire Lightbox-like image galleries, Facebook’s implementation does not seem quite as polished, in my opinion. Understandably, keeping the eyecandy to a minimum allows for faster delivery of the myriad of other scripts loaded upon visiting Facebook. At the same time, however, there should have been an accessible option to disable “theatre mode” altogether. Here, I will show you how this feature can be disabled using an easy-to-install Greasemonkey script.
If you have a web browser that supports Greasemonkey (for Firefox) or script importation (Opera natively supported; for IE; NinjaKit on Chrome; GreaseKit or NinjaKit on Safari), make sure that it is installed and activated.
Next, go to Userscripts.org and install the ‘facebook Photo Theatre Killer’ script and you are done! Wasn’t that easy? Now, revisit a photo gallery via your Facebook account and the annoying “theatre mode” should be gone.
Here is how it looks before applying the script…
Facebook image with theatre mode activated.
…and after.
Facebook image with theatre mode deactivated.
If you’re very observant, you will notice that all the script is essentially doing is removing the ‘&theater’ parameter from the URL string for the image. You can manually remove the parameter for each image being loaded without need of the script, but this does all of the hard work for you in the background so you can spend more time stalking your friends’ photo galleries!
