Facebook launches sharing and saving Chrome extensions, redesigns Like button for websites

Facebook today announced the launch of two new Chrome extensions that let users put more content into Facebook. One lets users easily share things they find on other sites onto their Facebook pages. The other lets users save websites for later.

Facebook’s Save feature now has more than 300 million monthly active users, up from more than 250 million in April, when Facebook launched a “Save to Facebook” button that developers can add to their sites. Besides letting you save new articles, videos, and other things to your Facebook account, the new Save extension for Chrome — the button has a bookmark logo — also lets you quickly access the things you’ve most recently saved, without requiring you to navigate over to Facebook.

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With the new Share extension, which employs the traditional lowercase F logo, you get a pop-up window that lets you share on your timeline, share on a friend’s timeline, share in a group, share in an event, share on a page you manage, or share in a private message. Of course, you can add a comment if you’d like.

Facebook is also making some changes to the familiar Like button that you see on websites other than Facebook itself. Facebook is swapping the classic lowercase F on the left side of the button and replacing it with a thumbs up — the icon people use to Like things on the Facebook app. And the number of likes is being added to the right side of the button, rather than appearing inside a chat bubble to the right of the button.

And there are new mobile-friendly button sizes for developers to choose from, Facebook software engineer Yue Cai wrote in a blog post. The Share, Follow, and Save to Facebook buttons have also been refreshed, Cai wrote.

Also today, Facebook said that publishers will be able to integrate Comment, Like, and Share buttons onto Instant Articles if they’ve added support for that feature — which displays articles quickly on mobile while consuming less data than usual. If publishers are using Facebook comments on their websites, then comments left on the web will also be displayed alongside Instant Articles. Plus, News Feed comments on articles can be added to Instant Articles and the web version of articles.

That level of integration could make publishers more interested in adding support for Facebook comments as well as Instant Articles.

Facebook is rolling out the redesigned buttons for websites in the next weeks, Cai wrote.