Facebook Tips: Remove the News Ticker and Sidebar in Facebook

Along with the forced migration to the new Timeline feature of Facebook, you also have to deal with that annoying sidebar that is split into two sections: one is a streaming news ticker and the other is a chat window. I use a desktop app to chat with Facebook friends and I never use the news ticker that shows all kinds of useless info about what my friends are doing every second.

If you want to remove that sidebar or modify it, there are a couple of things you can do. In this article, I’ll walk you through the various options that you have in Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox. If you employ a different method to customize Facebook in your browser, feel free to a post a comment here and let us know what you use.

First off, there are no add-ons for Internet Explorer currently that support removal of the News Ticker in Facebook completely. Instead, for IE, you only have one option and that is to hide the sidebar, which thankfully Facebook gives you the option to do!

You can also just press that button on Chrome or Firefox also. It’s a feature of Facebook, so it’s available on all browsers. Now that’s easy enough if you just want to hide the sidebar, but if you want to remove the News Ticker and just be left with the chat window, you have to install some extensions. Again, this will only work for Chrome and Firefox as there are no add-ons for IE yet to do this.

Remove News Ticker in Google Chrome

For Chrome, there are two extensions that I tried and that work really well. The first one is Facebook News Ticker Remover.

Once you install it, reload the Facebook tab and you’ll see that the sidebar now just has the chat option and the news ticker is gone.

You don’t have to do anything else, it just hides the news ticker automatically! The other extension that works fine is Hide Facebook Ticker (by SachinKRaj). Once installed, you’ll see a new icon in your toolbar and a message saying the extension is disabled.

Just click on the icon and it will be enabled. Then reload the Facebook tab and you should be good to go, again with just the chat part of the sidebar and the news ticker gone. For Firefox, you can download a plugin called Hide FB Ticker.

I like this one because you don’t have to install Greasemonkey or any userscripts. Just install this add-on and you’re good to go. It works just like the extensions in Chrome. That’s about it. Enjoy!

"Remove the News Ticker and Sidebar in Facebook"

Reference : online-tech-tips.com