Browser Extension of the Week: Silence of the Celebs

Posted 04/28/2011 at 9:56am | by Seamus Bellamy

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Large portions of Japan are in still ruins, the Middle East is spiraling deeper into chaos and the CEO of GoDaddy.com murders elephants in his downtime--but you can’t find anything about it online because major portals like CNN and Gawker are too busy providing a blow-for-blow account of Charlie Sheen winning. Yeah, we’re a little tired it too. That’s why Silence of Celebs has been picked as our Extension of the Week.

Once installed, Silence of the Celebs excels at blocking the inane prattle of over-exposed celebrities. Just open the extension's user interface, click on the stars that you’re sick of hearing about and watch them disappear from the interwebz before your very eyes. While this makes reading news sites like the NYTimes and HuffingtonPost bearable (depending on your political sensibilities), it can also turn a Twitter trawling session an absolute pleasure. 

The extension also lets users enter their own requests for content they feel would be better left unseen. That said, Silence of the Celebs does have a few unfortunate limitations. First, it’s only available for Google’s Chrome browser. Second, for the time being, the extension only works on a handful of sites. Fortunately, Silence of the Celebs’ developers have been adding support for a few more sites every week, and likely already covers a number of the pages you visit on a regular basis. Give it a try--you’ll be glad that you did.

Be sure to check back every Thursday for another edition of Browser Extension of