Facebook Steals Focus in Firefox – How to Fix It

If you’re like me, then you use social networking websites to keep in touch with your friends and family. My favorite is Facebook – that was until recently. For some reason, whenever someone started to chat with me, the browser window would “steal focus.” Well, even though I enjoy chatting with people, I want to do it my terms – meaning I’ll look at the chat window when I get a chance – not when Facebook wants me to. I experienced this problem many times while running Firefox and today, enough was enough! I started looking into the problem and discovered that I was not the only one who had experienced this problem. Fortunately, someone else had already come up with the answer – turn off the Facebook chat sound – a simple, yet effective solution. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Log into Facebook.
  2. Go to any page on Facebook and find the chat menu in the lower right-hand corner.
  3. Open the chat menu and find the Options button.
  4. Click on the Options button and uncheck the box “Play sound for new messages.”

While I prefer to have the sound enabled in Facebook chat, the stolen focus problem was just too much to bear any longer. Hopefully, Firefox or Facebook will fix the problem in the near future, but until then, this workaround is the way to go!

Check out the YouTube video I made about this subject:

4 Responses to “Facebook Steals Focus in Firefox – How to Fix It”

  1. david finn says:

    he was right! it really does work, just tried it out and my computer is running 10x’s faster now! good call sir!

  2. Anonymous says:

    Try using internet explorer instead, I have no problems with it using facebook. With older version of FF I did had exactly the same problems.

    • Bob Barcus says:

      Yes, you may be correct in your statement. However, there is still an issue with Firefox and Facebook. Just because this ONE thing works correctly in IE doesn't mean I'm going to switch back to IE. The only time I use Internet Explorer is when I absolutely have to or for testing purposes.

  3. mike says:

    I am not like you, I do not use face book, but firefox still steals the focus on my machine and it just started now. I have NOT upgraded ff to v5, its been at v4 since March.

Leave a Reply