How to uninstall Facebook Video Calling from Mac OS X

Have you ever installed Facebook Video Calling plugin in to your system? And does it not work at all?

You probably leaved it where it is and never used it anymore; but listen!
Facebook Video Calling installer places a scheduled task, FacebookUpdate, that is launched every 10800 seconds (3 hours), by the "tasks manager" used by Mac OS X: launchd.

It checks for Facebook Video Calling updates and probably sends informations about your system to Facebook servers (read Facebook is "Peeping" into Your System).

Why to waste CPU time (even if a very limited amount) and Internet bandwidth, to periodically check for updates and eventually download an update of a software that you will never use anymore?

The Facebook help page explanation is quite "simple": How do I uninstall the video calling plugin from my computer?.

But they don't tell you how to fully uninstall it and how to permanently remove the FacebookUpdate periodic task from your system.

Don't worry! I am here to help you. :-)

The first thing to do is to unload the job that periodically runs FacebookUpdate from the launchd agents.

To do so, open the Terminal application and type the following command.

launchctl -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.facebook.videochat.your_user_name.plist

This will tell to permanently unload the job from the launchd list and the job will be never loaded anymore when you login in to your Mac.

Then type:

launchctl remove ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.facebook.videochat.your_user_name.plist

This will permanently remove the plist configuration file from your file system.

If the FacebookUpdate application is running (not very probable) you can stop it using Activity Monitor application. Open it. From the "View" menu choose "All processes" and type "facebook" in the search text field. If the process is running, it will appear in the list. Select it and click the X button on the left of the tool bar to kill the process.

Now you can remove the files installed in the system. Go to ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins and remove the FacebookVideoCalling.bundle alias by pressing COMMAND-BACKSPACE or dragging it to the trash.

Then go to ~/Library/Application Support/Facebook and remove the video folder.

Great! You have finally get rid of this annoying and useless application.