mbasic.facebook.com still has messenger built in and doesnt take ages to load

Thanks so much. I've been using m.facebook.com but they removed the messenger from there. I've been using messenger lite because it doesn't require as many permissions and is just so much lighter to use, but it lacks one of the most important things to me: gifs

privacy, battery life and ram >>> gifs.

In my experience, m.facebook.com and mbasic.facebook.com return far less content than the full web page. And mbasic gets the least.

There have been times when mbasic has shown me two items, and that's it. Switching to m returned more. But only going to the full www showed me everything going on.

So now I restrict myself to using Facebook just one day a week. It's not as good as cutting Facebook off entirely, but it at least reduces some of its data gathering on me.

You might do it on a big computer if you have one. I keep Facebook in a fluid instance on my Mac. About 3 times in the past few years I’ve wished I had my login on my phone to get an address for an event or something, but haven’t gone there since I can remember. I don’t really use messenger though.

Google (YouTube, Search) and LinkedIn are doing that too. Especially if you are also using FireFox. Subtle differences in functionality, things missing here and there. Still I am opting for the web versions with my privacy settings and Privacy Badger, etc. LinkedIn app has a builtin Chromium browser that you can't control and may have custom code additions.

You can still go to m.facebook.com and then request desktop version to get access to messenger. But this is annoying, and most people aren’t aware of workaround like this.

I regularly use the mobile site messenger - you have to request a desktop site with m.facebook and the overlay won't show.

I suspect it'd be trivial to remove the overlay with CSS.

Have you tried Messenger Lite? I don't know about privacy implications of having it alone on your phone, no other FB apps, but it's quite good.