Just like any other day, I logged in to my gmail account yesterday, to check my inbox and send a few mails. Noticing that some friends were online, I decided to have a small chat with them. But the chat pop-up did not allow me to place the cursor, and I couldn’t enter any text or click on any emoticon.

I logged in to my other Gmail accounts, and found that the gmail chatbox worked fine with them. This really baffled me, how can the chatbox work on one account and not in the other?

I got suspicious and checked the account activity details and did not find anything suspicious IPs. The only ones I found were from my PC and my Android phone.

I tried clearing the cookies and the cache.That did not help. So I realised the issue is not with Gmail. Something is preventing the chatbox from working in that account.

Eager to find a fix, I googled about it and found that I was not the only one who faced this problem. There was a thread at the google forums and a member had replied that “Updating the subscription (filters) for Adblock Plus would fix the issue”.

Would adblock prevent the chatbox from working in one account? There was only one way to find out. I use Fanboy’s filters with custom rules, I allow ads on some websites/blogs. I tried updating the Filter and presto, it fixed the issue.

Source for the solution

Update:

Today I found another issue with gmail’s chat, I wasn’t able to use the arrow keys in the text box.I removed Fanboy’s list from Adblock and added the EasyList (English), updated the subscription and it fixed the issue. didn’t have to restart firefox or re-login to gmail.

Hope this helps some of you.