How to Disable Firefox Hello

Firefox Hello is the new online chat feature being offered by Mozilla Firefox web browser. This feature does not require any plugins and users can chat with any other person who is using a web browser that supports WebRTC like Opera, Chrome or Firefox itself. This new feature is enabled by default in the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and you can start the Firefox Hello conversations by clicking on the small smiley button in the toolbar. But as with everything else, not everyone is going to use this new feature from Firefox. And those who are never going to use it, might want to disable it from their copies of Firefox. Here is a simple trick to disable Firefox Hello from :

  1. First of all, 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. To narrow down the settings we want, type loop.enabled in the Search box.Disable Firefox Hello
  4. When the loop.enabled setting appears, you can double-click on it to toggle its value from true to false. When this setting is changed to false, the Firefox Hello feature shall be disabled.
  5. You have to close and restart your Firefox web browser for the changes to take effect. So close all the open Firefox windows, wait 10 seconds and then restart Firefox once again. You will see that smiley Hello icon from Firefox toolbar has disappeared.

Conclusion: Firefox Hello provides a plugin free WebRTC online chat feature that is built inside the web browser. But if you are not going to use it in the foreseeable future, then you can easily disable it easily in five seconds.

7 comments

  1. What really gets me is the bleeping persistence of the “Hello Icon” ALWAYS returning to the display after I have removed it. Hopefully disabling it will stop it’s messing up my display.

  2. Try downloading Pale Moon browser. They use the Firefox code so it runs like Firefox and you can use the plugins too, but doesn’t come with all the extras that FF puts in.

  3. That is only a half-truth, it still leaves WebRTC sitting there in your browser. So drawing attention to this Firefox Hello and saying heres how to stop seeing it is a bit deceptive.

    You’ll really want to set ‘media.peerconnection.enabled’ to false too. This will plug the webrtc leak vulnerabilities in firefox which have been sitting comfy in your browser since 2013.

    Its a very alpha, very buggy (looked like 100’s of reported bugs last time i looked) unfinished protocol they stuffed into firefox and forgot to tell you, its really best to just kill it before loads more hacks start using it.

  4. I don’t want to disable it, I want to remove it completely so it doesn’t take up additional hard disk space or other resources. Did anyone ask for this feature? I’ve never talked to anyone who said, “I really wish my web browser had a built in video chat app!” Why was this forced on everyone with no means to remove it? disabling it is not good enough.

    Voice/video chat is not something that belongs in your web browser (unless it’s something you conciously choose to have). Web browsers are for browsing the web.

  5. Its a f****** browser. Not an IM. Cant wait to have people bug me everywhere… gee…

  6. Great aiming – good shot!

    Feeling “overrun” by Mozilla, pressing for innovation while activating their RTC service by default, I was hunting about:config for “hello”, hoping to see something valuable gets filtered. There are six options that start with “loop.” in FF 35 and they have the strings with “hello” in the value field (and probably masked URLs) to the help site etc.
    Do not disable them, just disable “loop.enabled” as the author pointed out.

    Thanks for sharing this straight tip.

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