Ever since Facebook disabled the chat ability on the mobile version of its website, it’s been a problem for anyone who doesn’t wish to have Messenger installed on his or her Android smartphone to use the Facebook chat. I gave up on the idea and just used the Messenger on www.messenger.com for a long time, but recently I found a way to use the Facebook’s mobile website with the chat the old way.

Previously I have used Chrome and Firefox as my mobile browsers, but recently I’ve switched to Opera and I have found out two things about Facebook’s mobile website that work in Opera and don’t work in Chrome or Firefox. The first is chat, the second are notifications.

As for the first one, when you load Facebook in Opera and click the middle icon for chat, unlike other browsers which redirect you to the Play Store essentially telling you "install Messenger or go fuck yourself", Opera opens the messages like in the old times. I have no idea why this works only in Opera (or why does it work at all), but I’m not complaining.

As for the notifications, Opera has, by default, enabled notifications for Facebook so it notifies you every time a new red number appears in your blue Facebook header. This can get annoying and you may want to disable the notifications, but in case you don’t wish to have the Facebook app installed but want to know what happens in your hareem, you might welcome this functionality.

This way, Opera substitutes both the Facebook app and the Messenger app. We can only wait until Gaybook notices this and somehow disables the functionality also in Opera as it did for any other browser I’ve tried in recent years.

BTW, I’m not sure how e.g. Opera mini goes about this, you can share in comments if you know. I don’t feel like installing it just to find this out.