
Ask HN: Does the Intercom chat bubble drive you crazy? - rileyt
I&#x27;m so sick of visiting webpages and being pestered by the in-your-face Intercom live chat bubble. Does anyone else feel the same way?<p>Does anyone have a way to remove them? I might write a browser extension to automatically remove&#x2F;hide them if it doesn&#x27;t already exist (I looked and couldn&#x27;t&#x27; find anything).
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muzani
3/4 of the time it's not even a live chat and not much better than email.
Sometimes they have a chat bot that doesn't understand what you're asking them
and it becomes more frustrating.

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otras
What gets me worse is dynamically changing the page title to catch your eye.
Ex. something like:

    
    
      let documentTitle = document.title;
      let documentTitleWithNotification = "(1) " + documentTitle;
      let timeDelay = 1000;
      function makePlainTitle() {
        document.title = documentTitle;
        setTimeout(makeNotificationTitle, timeDelay);
      }
      function makeNotificationTitle() {
        document.title = documentTitleWithNotification;
        setTimeout(makePlainTitle, timeDelay);
      }
      makeNotificationTitle();
    
    

My peripheral vision is a sucker for motion.

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rileyt
Thanks for the fast replies. I was able to kill it by blocking the
widget.intercom.io domain with Privacy Badger. I wonder why it wasn't already
blocked by default...

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ezekg
I have differing opinions on this, depending on what side of the interaction
I'm on and a few other factors.

In my personal browsing: do I like them? It depends. If I'm interested in the
product/service, I may have questions or need support, so in that sense, yes.
If I'm just browsing and have little or no interest in converting, no -- I
find them annoying.

For my business: leads seem to love em, time wasters hate em. It's a great way
to start the conversation with quality leads while weeding out the visitors
who will waste your time.

Even if you personally find them annoying, when my business is talking to a
potential lead via Intercom, that conversation often results in a conversion.
So, in my opinion, I think it's worth annoying visitors (various levels of
annoyance depending on visitor) who aren't really interested anyways. It's a
win-win.

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AndreFvchs
[https://hellogoodbye.app/](https://hellogoodbye.app/) Didn't tried it yet but
it will remove the annoying chat bubbles.

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dickeytk
[https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/](https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/)

It’s not free, but works very well

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rajacombinator
I hate them yes. But businesses must find that people want to use them right?
(And it makes sense why they would.) Yet on my own sites all I get from them
is troll messages ...

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winkelwagen
Jup, so much visual clutter on some landing pages. Cookies, subscribe for my
newsletter, chat popup. Perhaps You can use privacy badger to block everything
from that domain.

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sdan
If you tweak uBlock origin's setting I'm fairly sure you can remove stuff like
banners/intercom bubbles popping up.

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detaro
Just use uBlock or another script/adblocker and block it using that, if your
defaults don't kill it already.

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crisopolis
Yes, that chat bubble even the notification noise it makes drives me crazy.

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gtsteve
uBlock or PrivacyBadger seems to eliminate them. I forgot how horrible the
internet can be without these extensions until I used a new Mac a few weeks
ago.

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shakkhar
Yes.

