How to Hide Offline Friends From Facebook Chat List (Internet Explorer 9, Chrome, Firefox)

Facebook chat is one of the most widely used apps on Facebook. It enables users chat with their online buddies. However, one annoyance is, Facebook’s new chat bar (shown in the lower right corner of the screen) lists all offline and online friends in mixed mode, so you need to move up and down in the chat list to find your friends, which is boring, especially, if you have large number of fiends in your list.

Why Facebook displays offline friends in the chat list? People can use this list to send message to offline friends and the message will be displayed to them when they are online. However many Facebook users do not use this feature.

Here is how to hide offline friends from Facebook’s chat list in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9)

First, copy and paste the below code into Notepad and save it as CSS file. For that, select ‘Save as’ in Notepad, in the ‘File name’ box enter ‘fbchat.css’ (without quote) and in the ‘Save as type’ box choose ‘All Files’.

.fbChatOrderedList li.item,
.fbChatOrderedList li.separator {
display: none !important;
}
.fbChatOrderedList li.active,
.fbChatOrderedList li.mobile {
display: block !important;
}
Now, launch IE9 and click ‘Tools’ menu (Alt + X) and choose ‘Internet Options’. Then select ‘Accessibility’.

In the pop up window, choose ‘Format documents using my style sheet’. Browse the CSS file (you just created) and click OK to save the settings.

That’s all! Your offline users will no longer be visible. See the changes by going to Facebook.

Note: You can always reverse it back to normal by unselecting ‘Format documents using my style sheet’ option.

Though Firefox and Google Chrome users can use this code to hide offline users, but not as simple as Internet Explorer. So, if you are a Firefox or Chrome user, you can use the following add-ons to hide offline users.

For Firefox user

You can install the add-on called Tidy Facebook Chat to hide offline Facebook friends from the chat list. You can download Tidy Facebook Chat from Mozilla add-on site.

For Google Chrome users

You can install the extension called Facebook Chat Fix to hide offline friend from Facebook chat list. You can install Facebook Chat Fix from Chrome Web Store.