How to hide the Facebook Ticker

Tecca

A new resident has taken over the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page: a real-time feed of your friends' activities. It's called the live Ticker, and it shows you every status update, comment, Like, and friend request (depending on your friends' privacy settings). When the new Facebook interface we first saw during f8 rolled out, the Ticker started showing micro-actions from all kinds of sources.

Spotify, for example, tells you what song a friend is listening to and lets you listen along. If your Facebook homepage doesn't display the Ticker yet, don't worry — you'll be seeing it soon enough. But if you already have a case of Tickeritis and want to get rid of it right now, you've come to the right place.

Minimize your Ticker window
If your Ticker is integrated into a blue-colored sidebar together with your chat window, you have an easy way to get it out of sight. Hover your mouse between the Ticker and the chat box. Once the resize arrow appears, pull the chat boxall the way up. That covers most of the ticker, leaving only an update or two visible.

Note that you can't always see the sidebar. According to Facebook, it's "sensitive to the amount of free space you have on your screen, so it only appears if there's enough room for it." Your chat panel goes back to its old place as a bar at the bottom of your screen when the browser window isn't big enough. Whenever you want to want to access your sidebar, just maximize your browser and click on the chat bar.

You might, however, encounter a bug that prevents you from accessing your sidebar. Try signing out and signing back in, clearing your browser's cache, or reinstalling your browser.

If nothing works, try these other methods to get rid of the Ticker. We'll be tackling them browser by browser. Onward!

Firefox helpers

  • Greasemonkey Ticker script

    One way to fix your Ticker issues in Firefox is by installing Greasemonkey, an extension that enhances your browser with small bits of JavaScript. After installation, you'll be prompted to restart your browser. With Greasemonkey working in your browser, go to the Remove Facebook Right-Column page — just click install to run the script on Firefox, and you're good to go! Unlike the Chrome extensions that specifically target the Ticker, this Firefox script completely removes the right-hand part of your Facebook page. That includes ads, event invitations, suggested users, and birthday reminders. If those have always bothered you anyway, then it's a win-win situation.

  • Feed Filter

    Go to Feed Filter's page, and click Add to Firefox. After restarting your browser, you'll notice a new red "ff" button beside your address bar. To hide your Ticker, click on the button's pull-down menu, choose Feed Filter Options, and navigate your way to the Sidebar selection. Just click Hide on the Ticker row, and you're done! Feed Filter lets you customize your Facebook page even further, so you can experiment as you wish. If you change your mind about the alterations you've made, just click the Tools menu on your Firefox browser, go to Add-ons, choose Extensions, and disable or remove Feed Filter.

Chrome extensions
Add-ons or extensions expand a browser's functions, and a variety of them — from ad blockers to dictionaries — are readily available for download. For Google Chrome, specifically, you can choose from two free extensions that block the Facebook Ticker. Installing a Chrome extension is easy — simply go to the add-on's page, and click Add to Chrome.

But wait — what if you change your mind? Have you lost the Ticker forever? Not at all! To remove the add-on, click the Chrome wrench beside the address bar, go to Tools and then to Extensions, where you can manage your add-ons. You can uninstall the extension if you want, or temporarily disable it if you just want to look at Ticker updates for a few minutes or so.

Facebook customizers for Opera and Safari
Opera and Safari users, don't despair — solutions exist for your Ticker problems, as long as you're willing to tweak your Facebook interface. Facebook customizers are numerous, and they can overhaul your page's look in a snap. They can also be used for Chrome and Firefox, so if you don't want to use the extensions listed above for any reason, feel free to opt for customizers instead.

  • Better Facebook Install the add-on to your browser of choice, and navigate to Facebook. You'll see at once how extensively you'll be able to customize your page, with every Facebook widget now equipped with exit buttons at the top right. Find the Ticker, and click X to kick that content off your page.

  • Facebook Purity Customization options for Facebook Purity are a bit less obvious than Better Facebook's. After installing the program, go to your Wall and find the small F.B. Purity bar below the status update text box. Click on it and find the Ticker Bar option on the new window that pops up. Check the Hide box behind it, and you're done.

Manually unsubscribing from your friends


For those of you who use Internet Explorer or prefer a more granular approach to friend feed management, you can turn to Facebook's own tool and unsubscribe from their updates by hand.

Click on a Ticker entry of anyone you want to remove. On the box that pops up, find the downward-pointing chevron at the top right and click it. Choose Hide story from the options on the pull-down menu. Once it's hidden, you're given the choice to Unsubscribe from that friend or to Unfriend that person altogether. Make your choice, and get rid of that person's Ticker updates forever!

Clearly, you're not alone in wanting to be rid of this feature, with so many ways available to scrub it already!

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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