How to Hide the Facebook Ticker

Instructions on how you can hide the new Facebook "ticker", the reall-time scrolling activity display that sits in the upper right corner of the browser window and does not go away when you scroll down the page.
Last updated: 3 January 2012

The developers at Facebook are continuously making changes to their site, sometimes small, sometimes big. In September of 2011 they introduced a new feature called the "ticker", which shows live, real-time activity reports of what your Facebook friends are doing. Some people have refered to this as "Facebook inside Facebook", since it seems to reproduce the news feed that is now central to the Facebook experience. The difference, of course, is that your News Feed only updates when you refresh the page, but the ticker updates continuously.

Some people do not like the ticker because it is different from what they are used to. Some people find the ticker annoying, because it changes at random times while one is reading something else, which is distracting. Also, the ticker does not stay at the top of the page when you scroll down, it stays at the top of the window, so that it is always visible, always causing a distraction from the rest of the page.

It turns out there is a fairly simple way to either hide the ticker completely, or to make it scroll with the rest of the page, at least if you use Firefox. You do this by adding a few lines to a file called userContent.css, which Firefox will apply, if it exists, after it is done loading the page from the server.

That file probably does not exist on your computer, so you will have to create it. First you have to find the right folder or directory, which depends on what kind of computer you have. On a Mac it is in

/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xyzzy.default/chrome

while on Windows it will be something like

C:\Documents and Settings\$USER\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xyzzy.default\chrome

where in either case $USER is your login username (often "home" on a Mac) and "xyzzy" will be some other set of random letters.

Using a simple text editor (TextEdit on Mac, Notepad on Windows), create in that directory a file named userContent.css and in that file enter the following (cut and paste from this page should be fine):

@-moz-document domain(facebook.com) { #pagelet_rhc_ticker { display: none !important; } }

Then restart Firefox. When you come back to Facebook, the ticker will be gone. Or more correctly, it will still exist, but it won't be visible and it won't take up any space on the page. So it's gone.

Making the Ticker scroll with the page

If you like the ticker, but just don't want it to follows you down the page, then you can keep it around, but make it scroll with the rest of the page. To do so, put the following in the userContent.css file instead:

@-moz-document domain(facebook.com) { .fixed_elem { position: static !important; } }

Keep in mind that Facebook often makes changes to their site, and they have announced that there are many more changes that will follow the ticker, so it may well be that this fix does not work after a while. But for now, this will let you get rid of the ticker if you dont' like it.

Hiding Wikipedia requests for donations

The same mechanism can be used to hide solicitations for donations that are now appearing on Wikipedia. You know, the ones with a big picture of Jimmy Wales (the founder) or someone else who's involved in Wikipedia, asking for money. They appear at the top of every article. Every once in a while would not be that annoying, like an occasional NPR pledge drive, but when it's every article you look for a way to get rid of it. Here it is:

@-moz-document domain(wikipedia.org) { #siteNotice { display: none !important; } .cn-fundraising { display: none !important; }

References

Per-site custom CSS in Firefox, by Corey Gilmore (23 October 2008)
I love it when Wikipedia asks for donations - The Oatmeal