We have seen a number of changes and upgrades that Facebook has done in order to analogue and compete with the newly launched social network, Google Plus. Recently Facebook introduced the new lightbox photo viewer, which many users found quite annoying, and were finding ways to disable it.

When a user clicks on an image, the lightbox appears with a dark background along with the comment box. However, I noticed a different lightbox today, and I guess Facebook is experimenting and will probably change the appearance of the lightbox. The new expectedlightbox which I noticed today had a white background instead of black, and along with it, the image had Like, Commentand Tag Photolinks embedded on it.

Here’s the screenshot -

It also had the usual right and left arrow buttons which are used to view the next or previous photo in the album. The embedded links appear even without the lightbox. I opened the image in a new tab (opening an image in a new tab will disable the lightbox) and noticed the same links on the image -

I refreshed the page and clicked on the same image to view in lightbox. Interestingly, I noticed that the right and left arrow buttons vanished. I wondered how to go to the next image. I clicked on the right side of the image, and I was taken to the next image. Clicking on the left side of the image took me to the previous image. Arrows were better, I felt.

Nevertheless, users have already started to hate the new feature. The light gray and white background makes the image impossible to see, and it does hurt the eyes!

This however indicates that the Facebook team is currently working and trying out several different changes to see which would be feasible to implement.

It’s unsure whether Facebook will push forward and roll out this change to all users,  however  it is certainly interesting to see Facebook taking things seriously to avoid people migrating to Google+ as it continues to gain popularity.

Thanks to the Google Translate team, which introduced the Translatefeature on Google+, where users can translate posts and comments into more than 50 languages. The feature is new and isn’t available on Facebook, hence the Facebook team is experimenting to introduce a similar feature which will break the language barrier and help users translate posts and comments to various other languages. Currently, Facebook is experimenting with languages like Chinese, French, Hebrew, and Spanish, but more languages are expected to be added.

Whether or not the new white lightbox will be rolled out, it definitely will continue to annoy users on Facebook. Do you really think that this change would be useful? Let us know by adding your comments below.