Shield yourself from imminent “Star Wars” spoilers with these Chrome extentions
Mere mortals won’t be able to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens until its wide release date on Dec. 18, but the movie premiered for a lucky 6,000 on Monday and many reviews will be posted on Wednesday.
So the spoilers are about to come hard and fast and you need to be prepared.
A Google Chrome extension we wrote about last month claimed to block potential spoilers, but it doesn’t work very well; if you simply visit Mashable.com, for example, the entire site will be blacked out, preventing you from reading anything but that’s only after a few seconds have passed, which is enough time for you to catch a spoiler. The same goes for most other websites.
But that doesn’t mean you have to drive to a cabin in the middle of the woods with no cellular reception to avoid spoilers. Force Block and Spoiler Alert may be our saviors.
Force Block
Force Block is a simple, Star Wars-specific Chrome extension scans a webpage as it loads and blocks it if it finds any Star Wars references at all not only spoilers for The Force Awakens. It significantly darkens the entire page below the spoiler alert, which can be a good thing, but is often frustrating.
Force Block also lets users add individual pages to a white list, so if there’s a specific article you don’t want to be blocked from, the extension will remember.
Generally, this extension is fairly cautious, blocking nearly all textual references to Star Wars. That means images including images with text on top, like the featured headlines you see on Mashable’s homepage aren’t blocked.
Force Block isn’t perfect, of course, but in these fraught times filled with Force Awakensspoilers, it’s the extension we need. Don’t think of this extension so much as a Luke Skywalker, but rather a Han Solo: the hero we need.[related-posts]
Spoiler Alert
While this extension isn’t Star Wars-specific, it may be the more effective choice. Spoiler Alert lets users block whatever words they specify, whether that be Star Wars or Donald Trump. Instead of darkening an entire webpage, Spoiler Alert only blocks specific mentions of the thing you don’t want spoiled.
So if you log onto the homepage of a news website, the extension will only block Star Wars-related headlines, rather than the entire page. The formatting sometimes looks clunky in practice, but it’s much less annoying than blocking entire webpages, especially when you consider how much Star Wars is talked about.
If all else fails, you can always throw your computer and cellphone in the trash.
[Mashable]
