Disclosure: barracuda pay me to do stuff
A | B
C | D
The actual construction of a timeline I haven't heard any of my friends really complain too much about.
Against my better judgement I've been on Facebook for years and outside of the occasional look back on someone profile to see when their kid was born, got a new job, etc I never leave the newsfeed view.
But, agreed on the horrible reading experience though, the only thing worse is
A | C
B | D
style that academic papers still use.
Edit: the above style is worse when reading on a screen of any sort, on paper fine, but screen inevitably leads to scrolling around and doing quite a bit of context switching
I mean, you're not reading a book-- it's more likely you'll read a status update and then expand and read the comments directly below it rather than reading a large number of statuses in a row.
The news feed is still in a single-column format because you might actually read quite a few in a row of those.
At any rate these extensions seem like an exercise in futility as Facebook will surely completely remove the non-timeline functionality sooner or later.
Those who've recently divorced don't really want to look at their own timeline and see a bunch of stuff with their spouse 2 years ago. Those who have grown in maturity or changed religious/political views don't really want some stupid thing they said 5 years ago to be a mere one screen-length from the top of the page.
I personally am irritated with the "curated" experience. It ties in with sorting wall posts to "top stories" instead of by date. I know there was a discussion last month I want to get back to, but FB has decided it doesn't show up on my timeline or my friend's timeline, because it only gives a selection of posts from that month.