After hinting about it last year, Facebook is finally giving its users the ability to hide certain tabs from the top nav bar bar as well as an option to turn off notification dots. The new feature, called Shortcut Bar settings, is gradually being rolled out to Android users over the coming weeks.

When Facebook initially announced the personalization benefits of the navigation bar last year, they sounded useful. In theory, the app was supposed to analyze your behavior and display only relevant and helpful tabs — a minimum of four (News, Notifications, Menu, Watch) to a maximum of six. In reality, the bar was frequently used as a placeholder for Facebook to promote its own features like Marketplace. Making things worse, the constant presence of the red dots often diverted people's attention away from their personal notifications and toward time-wasting Group feeds and Event wall posts.

With the new Shortcut Bar settings option, you can now get rid of most tabs, such as News, Today In, Events, Groups, Profile, Friend Requests, Gaming, Dating, Watch, and Marketplace. Alternately, you can choose to keep the tabs but silence just the notification dots.

Removing tabs from the shortcut bar or turning off just the notification dots is easy: tap and hold on a shortcut item then make a selection when a menu pops up like in the screenshot above. Alternatively, you can tap on the three-line More icon, Settings & Privacy > Settings > Shortcuts menu and toggle off the tabs from there.

In response to TechCrunch's inquiry, Facebook said this feature should finish rolling out to all Android users over the coming weeks.

Source: TechCrunch