How to open links in external browser with Facebook Messenger

For a while now, both the Facebook and Messenger app have been opening links in their own, internal browser — a simple webview window, which doesn’t support multiple tabs and is there to allow you to quickly interact with something on the web, and even allow said item to communicate back to your Facebook app instantly.

That said, a lot of people find the internal browser annoying. Why? Well, sometimes you just tap on a YouTube video only to be greeted by a webview window, which opens a desktop version of the YouTube site that you are not even logged into. Lame. Sometimes, you want to open a web page in your Chrome or Safari browser so that it can stay there as an open tab. Other times, you get so into the information you are reading about that you want to quickly open a few more tabs on it and do a deeper research… oops, you can’t — you are not in your browser of choice, you are in Facebook’s webview.

Needless to say, many users out there would prefer it if their links simply open in a default app of choice — if it’s a YouTube link, just have it open the video in the YouTube app; if it’s a web link, just launch it in Chrome or Safari.

Well, there’s a solution for that problem… if you are on Android. That’s right, for some odd reason, Facebook does not allow iPhone users to opt out of using its internal browser. If you are on iOS, you are forced to manually swap apps, though it’s not as slow or painful as it may sound.