How To Disable ‘Seen’ for Facebook Messages and Messenger

Facebook has a pretty neat feature of letting you know if someone has read the messages you had sent them by showing ‘Seen’. While some may consider the feature as useful, it is a very easy way for someone to keep nagging you on Facebook. Yes you read that right ! Everyone you ‘friend’ on Facebook is not necessarily your friend or someone you actually want to talk to on a regular basis. You do not always want to reply to all the messages you get on Facebook. But what if someone had sent you a message on Facebook but you chose not to reply to them? The next time your ‘friend’ meets you in person, it is not going to be a pleasant conversation

The ‘Seen’ feature in Facebook messaging is comparable to ‘Last Seen’ option on the popular messaging app Whatsapp (except that Whatsapp is too aggressive and shows the time whenever you use the app). Here’s how you can disable the ‘Seen’ feature on Facebook messages which will not cause any significant harm to anyone :

How To Disable ‘Seen’ for Facebook Messages and Messenger

Google Chrome

There are many extensions on the official Google Chrome Web store which you can install to disable this. These extensions are “one-click” install and disables the ‘Seen’ in Facebook messages without further effort. Click below to install one of the popular extensions :

Facebook Unseen
Messenger UNSEEN on Facebook
SeenBlock

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox already has a very powerful extension called GreaseMonkey which lets you edit the behaviour of websites and pages very easily using JavaScript.
First install GreaseMonkey from here
Then install this user script called Facebook Stealth

Other Browsers

If you are using a different web browser than Chrome or Firefox, you will need to either find ‘Developer Tools’ or some other way to add a URL filter/URL blocking. To block the Facebook ‘Seen’ for messages on other browsers, you just need to block the below URL:

/ajax/mercury/change_read_status.php$domain=facebook.com

There is no need to feel forced to reply to your ‘friends’ on Facebook anymore !