Hacksar

If you have used Google’s iGoogle personalized homepage, you have probably come across the various updates that have been slowly applied to different accounts. I was just given an update where a Google Chat, or gTalk, “tab” was added to my iGoogle homepage. Gmail has had this little box for a while now, but since I do the majority of my email checking through the Gmail widget in iGoogle, I never was bothered by the gTalk box.

However, now that the gTalk chat box is on iGoogle as well, it is starting to become bothersome. It often lags behind and takes the page a very long time to load; this is especially annoying if you have iGoogle set as your home page, as I do. I looked around for ways on how to remove the gTalk box from iGoogle. True, it has an option to “hide” the chat box, but it still leaves a large “Enable Chat” link in it’s place, which can still be annoying. Here’s the solution I made after not finding any other good / working solution. (Solutions such as editing the XML file didn’t work and I wanted to avoid GreaseMonkey scripts because those can slow your browser down as well.)

Note that this solution only works with Firefox. If you do not use Firefox, change over as it’s much faster, more secure and customizable.

1. In Firefox, install the AdBlock+ add-on if you don’t already have it installed. It will block all banner ads and other advertisements that can slow down browsing. It also has the option for custom filters, which is what we’ll be using here.
2. Once AdBlock+ is installed, go to your iGoogle homepage and locate the gTalk tab that was automatically added to your homepage. At the bottom of the box, there will be an “Options” drop down. In this, select the “Hide Chat” option. This will disable gTalk on your homepage, but now it will be replaced with a large “Enable Chat” button rather than the “Chat” tab.
3. Go to the AdBlock+ options in Tools -> AdBlock Plus Preferences. You will see a list of the rules for blocking ads. Click “Add filter…” at the bottom left and type in the following where the blank typable line appeared:
   

   google.com#div(enable_chat)

   Hit enter.

4. Hit “OK” and refresh the page. The “Enable Chat” link should have disappeared. You no longer have to worry about that pesky link or extra loading time!

So, AdBlock+ is a great add-on that you can use in almost any case when something exists on a website that you don’t want to see. That and FireBug, another incredible Firefox add-on that should be featured on Hacksar soon, make a kick-ass team (kick ass-team?) when used properly together.

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