Facebook to restore chronological feed of posts from friends

Facebook is going back to basics, restoring a chronological news feed to its app to make it easier for users to keep up with posts from their friends.

The new tabs will begin appearing on the Facebook app from Thursday and will roll out globally over the next week.

The change is one of the most significant to come to the News Feed since the switch to algorithmic sorting in 2011. The feed itself, borrowed from sites such as Twitter and Flickr but patented by Facebook in 2010, was wildly controversial when it was first introduced in 2006, with users arguing it was a privacy violation to group previously hidden information such as posts, photos and likes in one easy view. But its popularity soon won out, and a news feed rapidly became standard for almost every social network.