How to Disable YouTube Live Chat

Jun 1, 2018 Web and Internet Nick Vogt Comments (14)

Please note that this post is over a year old and may contain outdated information.

Here's a simple way to hide the YouTube live chat window and block it from loading altogether. This should also result in a small improvement to page load speed when visiting YouTube video pages that have live chat.

Get an Ad Blocker

To block the live chat, you'll need an ad blocker extension or plug-in for your browser. If you don't already have one, you can get one from your browser's extension/plug-in page. I recommend µBlock Origin for either Chrome or Firefox. Any one that supports the AdBlock Plus filter syntax will work.

Adding a Custom Filter

Once you have the ad blocker installed, you'll need to add two lines to the custom filter section. You can do this in the "My filters" section of uBlock, which can be found depending on your browser at:

Chrome
More Tools > Extensions > uBlock Origin Options > My filters

Firefox
Add-ons > Extensions > uBlock Origin Options > Show Dashboard > My filters

Add these two filters on their own lines (copy and paste them) and then hit "Apply changes":

https://www.youtube.com/live_chat
www.youtube.com###chat

You shouldn't need to restart your browser.

Reverting Back

If you want to revert back to allowing YouTube live chat, you'll have to remove the filters from your custom filters.

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Comments (14)

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jacemace Aug 17, 2019
thanks for the filter

banani Aug 15, 2019
feels like my life was saved

banani Aug 15, 2019
damn! respek!

TG2 Jul 27, 2019
Under ABP on Vivaldi (chrome fork) I'm using the following two .. the second one actually stopped the box from showing up: ====== youtube.com###show-live-chat-button youtube.com##div[class^="yt-uix-expander live-chat-expander"] But in Basilisk (firefox fork) using Adblock Latitude, I only needed to use: ||www.youtube.com/live_chat_replay* though reading the other comments, this ...replay* may or may not be blocking access to Youtube's relay subsystems (blocking would be good .. no attempts to connect/reconnect etc) Either way .. Youtube should've realized that there are people that don't want the chat. I mean its appearing on AVB's ASTOT episodes .. wow .. fantastic .. if I was ON youtube when this was live .. maybe it'd be relevant, but 6 months later? no, just stupid.

Baronash Jun 13, 2019
THANKS, thanks, thanks.

Alex May 22, 2019
Thank you very much for posting this, very useful!

Cyrile11 Apr 24, 2019
This still works thank you so much!!! Works as described and does exactly what Nick said in the comments from Jun 04, 2018.

Greg Mar 27, 2019
What a breath of fresh air. Works as described. Thanks for the help, friend!

Loris Dec 14, 2018
Good job, thanks.

Mateo_7 Oct 28, 2018
Thank you so much! I hate that stupid chat. Good riddance!

boon Aug 18, 2018
You're a lifesaver! this worked like a dream, thank you so much!

Random Guy Jul 31, 2018
Legit, thank you so so so so so much, this worked PERFECTLY. Loading chat has been devouring my CPU forever, cannot thank you enough for this tip. Copied and pasted the filters, you are a godsend. Very grateful.

Nick Jun 04, 2018
I double checked the network traffic and this does block the requests as well as the element. The "https://www.youtube.com/live_chat" filter blocks the requests to "https://www.youtube.com/live_chat/get_live_chat" that are normally there. Testing it further, if you disable the filters, load a video page with live chat, then enable the filters (with the video tab still open), after a few moments the live chat window will show the message "Chat disconnected. Please wait while we try to reconnect you."

Jon Jun 01, 2018
This doesn't actually block it from loading. It's only hiding it using css display:none. It's still there in the dom and loading in new comments etc.