how to hide facebook ads
Thursday, January 1st, 2009I was going to keep this little nugget all to myself, but for the good of mankind, I will share it. So, after the 40,312st time being bombarded with facebook’s “Want a girlfriend?” ad, I decided I was sick of being reminded of my tragic singlehood and that I would put a stop to it. If you’re a hip Mac/Firefox user (and if not, you should be!), here’s how to pwn facebook ads:
In Finder, go to your Applications folder. Ctrl-click (or right-click) Firefox and select Show Package Contents. Navigate to Contents/res/html.css. Open this file using your preferred text editor. Then place this line at the very top of the file:
.fb_content #sidebar_ads {visibility:hidden !important}
Save the file and restart Firefox. You’ll find facebook to be a lot less depressing.
The downside to this method is that it’s reactionary; you’ll need to change the html.css file every time you upgrade to a new version of Firefox. And if facebook changes its HTML structure so that the <div> containing the ads is called something other than #sidebar_ads, then you’ll need to change the code to reflect that. But still. This is pretty sweet. And it will work for Safari and Internet Explorer too, for Mac or PC–you’ll just have to locate where your chosen browser’s default CSS file is and insert that line of code. Yay.