How to Disable Social Features in Mozilla Firefox

The new versions of Firefox have come up with social features that integrates social network right on the Firefox toolbar. You can share any webpage to your friends or followers with this button and your social network updates appear in the sidebar of Firefox. This makes it much more convenient and easy to stay in touch with what is happening on various social networking platforms. But these days everyone uses their smartphones to check out the social network happenings. The desktop browser is often used for non-personal things like ordering a pizza for the family. If you do not want the social features in your Firefox browser, then you can disable them using these steps:

  1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar (where you type the website addresses) and press Enter.
  2. This will show you some sort of warning and warranty, you can click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button to proceed.
  3. This will open a list of configurable settings for Firefox browser. Right-click anywhere, and select New → Boolean from the menu. Type social.enabled as the setting name and give it a value false.Disable Firefox Social Features
  4. Similarly, create another boolean setting with name social.active and give it a value false. Now you should two new settings have social.active and social.enabled, both set to value false.Disable Firefox Social Features
  5. Close the about:config tab. Right-click on the paper-plane icon in the Firefox toolbar and choose Remove from toolbar.Disable Firefox Social Features
  6. You have to restart Firefox browser for the settings to take effect.

Conclusion: While Firefox social features are great for people who spend a lot of time hopping from one social network to another, they can be a source of privacy invasion. If you use your smartphone to stay connected with social networks then you can safely disable social features from Firefox.