Kill the Facebook ticker with custom CSS

Some reports say that 86% of people hate the new Facebook design, and I bet it’s the ticker that’s the target of everyone’s ire. I did some investigation and found that it was actually not too difficult to kill the ticker.. if you’re willing to get your hands dirty with CSS.

Background for non-geeks: CSS is a language that controls how a web page looks. Luckily, website users like us can also specify our own CSS to override what websites want to show us. In this case, we’ll be using our own CSS to hide the Facebook ticker.

Download the Stylish browser extension

Stylish is a browser add-on that enables us to use our own CSS for specific websites. It’s available for both Firefox and Google Chrome. Safari users can use the User CSS extension. (I’m a Safari user too, but the majority of the world isn’t. Hence the Firefox examples..)

Restart Firefox to complete the install process. The extension will now bring you to it’s website but ignore it. Go to www.facebook.com.

Write a new style for facebook.com

On the bottom left of Firefox, you should see a new ‘S’ icon. If you don’t, go to the menu bar, click View » Toolbars » Add-on Bar.

Click on it and select Write a new style » For facebook.com. Copy and paste the following CSS code in between the curly braces of the new window that appears.

/* Hide the ticker above the chat sidebar */
div#pagelet_ticker { display: none; }

/* Hide the divider between the ticker & chat sidebar */
div.fbSidebarGripper { display: none; }

/* Hide the ticker when sidebar is closed */
div#pagelet_rhc_ticker { display: none; }

You should have something like this:

Save it and voila! No more Facebook ticker 😀

Safari and Chrome users, you should be smart enough to figure it out based on the above.

Update: You can add one more rule to stretch the chat sidebar to full height if you like:

/* Stretch the chat bar when ticker is hidden */
fbChatSidebarBody { height: 100%; }

If you found this post useful, please share it on Facebook by clicking the Like button on this page (how ironic).


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