I hate Facebook’s “Oooh, isn’t this GREAT! Look what WE can do!” implied breathless excitement over implementing all sorts of new features. And of course, this almost always sends me running back into my settings to try to minimize the aggravation that these “enhanced features” do to MY Facebook experience.
I like my Facebook experience simple – just want to see what everyone’s been up to – no muss, no fuss. And for D*MNED sure, no chat. And I don’t want my screen cluttered up with a silly chat window begging me to let everyone know I’m available for chat when I seldom, if EVER, have any intention of chatting.
Naturally, there is NO way to remove this annoying waste of space directly in the settings as it’s an absolute CERTAINTY that EVERYONE will want to CHAT on Facebook. Yeah, right. A little digging on Google for “remove facebook chat window” and it appears that there’s a LOT of people that hate this thing. Eventually I found a workable answer on it.
So how do you get rid of the Facebook Chat window? At least as of this post on 8/24/2011, this works for Mozilla Firefox. No idea on IE, but I really don’t use IE except for testing websites…
If you don’t already have AdBlocker Plus, get it from your Firefox addons.
- Go to the top bar (yours may be configured differently) click “Tools” => “Addons” , or hit <CTRL><SHIFT><A> to bring it up quick.
- type “adblock plus” in the little search box. Enter . You should see Adblock Plus come up as an available addon. Install it.
- You’ll need to restart the browser.
Configure AdBlocker Plus
- Go to the ABP stop sign icon and click it.
- Preferences
- Click “Filters” at the top. “Add Filter” That will give you an area that allows you to add some rules in – and we will only need to add one.
- Tap in “facebook.com#div(id*=presence)” without the quotes. See picture below.
- Click “Apply” and “OK”
Do a refresh on your window and resume enjoying your Facebook experience with no chat window.
Add this setting in to get rid of Facebook Chat windows once and for all.
Facebook – suck it! And quit ruining my life!
Thanks to ZahiPoint.com – I just updated the steps for the newer Firefox and Adblocker Plus versions – their instructions were a bit confusing.
Follow
