In brief: In a move that should restore some sanity to the Facebook app, the company has decided to let users spare themselves the many disruptions caused by the tabs and red notification dots on the navigation bar.
When Facebook isn't busy stamping its name on Instagram and WhatsApp or redesigning its logo to differentiate the company from the products, it gets busy making the apps better. And we're not just talking about Dark Mode, which is currently available for Messenger and in testing for Facebook.
In an age when everyone is bombarded with notifications inside and outside every app, the company has apparently decided to let its users clear away some of the visual clutter created by the red notification dots.
Now you can decide what you want to see in the Facebook app's navigation bar using the Shortcut Bar Settings. You can also tap and hold on certain tabs like Marketplace, Groups, Watch, Events, Profile, Friend Requests, News, Today In, Gaming, and Dating to have them removed from the navigation bar using the pop-up menu that shows up. If you'd prefer to keep them but instead silence their notification dots, there's an option for that as well.
While these tabs and red dots serve well to remind users of the many things that Facebook wants you to do on their platform, the attention grabbing is pushing many to spend more time than they should inside the app. The company said last year that this was a way to personalize navigation for every user according to what functions they use the most, but the option to manually change shortcuts arguably should have been there to begin with.