How to Disable the News Headlines in Netscape Messenger

Netscape Messenger opens with News Headlines in the message box. Here's a way to change Netscape so it will open a blank window when first opening the mail.

Be sure to backup your prefs.js file before doing any of these steps to avoid a problem, but here's the steps involved in deleting the pop up ads from Netscape.
If you wish to disable this feature so that Messenger starts up with a blank window, do the following:


1.Exit Communicator by choosing Exit from the File menu.

Note: Be sure to do this as any changes you make to your preferences file will be lost if any Communicator process
is running while you are editing this file. Check that the mail notifier that runs in the system tray in Windows has stopped as well. If you have been running java applets, it can take as much as 30 seconds for all Java applets to stop and Communicator to exit.

2.Open your preferences file: prefs.js

Do a search to find out where it is, and open it in your favorite text editor. (Windows users can click the Start button, choose Find, Files or Folders, type prefs.js, and click Find Now. When you locate your prefs.js file, right-click it and choose Open With, Notepad or simply open the file in Notepad directly) If there are multiple Netscape profiles on your computer, be sure you are editing the preferences file for the correct profile.

You can safely ignore the "Do not edit this file" warning in the preferences file while you are setting this preference since Communicator is not running.

3.Add the following line to the bottom of your preferences file:

user_pref("mailnews.start_page.enabled", false);

4.Save and close the file.

5.Re-start Messenger.

This will cause Messenger to start up with an empty message pane rather than the Netcenter Messenger start page