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.

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