The internet is a scary place sometimes, and by ‘sometimes’ I mean most of the time. With the news cycle filled with violence, political aggression, and the cancellation of all your favourite TV shows, we all need a bit of an escape. The cheapest and easiest way to do that, of course, is completely goof up your websites with Chrome extensions in your browser.
Avoiding all the depressing headlines is going to require about the same level of intervention as that of a helicopter parent; luckily, there’s a bunch of app developers who have a fresh take on the mature content lock that’ll turn you online experience into nothing but sunshine.
The NOOT NOOT extension by anodium, for example, is a Chrome extension that will censor swear words with the obnoxious call of everyone’s favourite claymation penguin. The downside is that you might get a migraine from trying to reverse engineer this app’s rendering of ‘assassination’.
There’s more still for the prudes among us, as the creators of The Good Place have produced their own very creative censoring Chrome extension. As well as Good-Place-ifying every F-bomb on your screen, it’ll turn your search bars into Janets and even tell you when to take a time out. Truly adds new meaning to ‘safe for work’. Queer Eye, meanwhile, will have you spicing up every conversation with your boss with a hearty ‘yas!’
Trying to read a news article about a controversial issue, but the comment section is making you see red? About to fly into an all-out murder spree next time you see someone commenting ‘liKe iF uR waTcHinG iN 2019!!1!’ on a music video? Then you need the cuteness of the Comments To Cats Chrome extension to quell your rage. Instead of seeing the worst of humanity when you scroll down, you see the best of kittendom. It’s truly a win-win situation.
The 2016 US Presidential election has been a profound source of inspiration for late night show hosts and their writers, and a source of crushing pessimism for just about everyone else. To bring some balance back to the universe, The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight have both gifted us Trump-altering Chrome extensions. The former will turn every POTUS tweet into an 8-year-old’s crayon doodle, while the latter replaces every instance of the word ‘Trump’ with ‘Drumpf’ – a reference to his ancestral surname.
Now, don’t think for a second that I’ve forgotten to include all the Chrome extensions that will very usefully screw up your reading comprehension forever. Memes have done so much to advance the English language, and thankfully there are developers out there who sacrifice it all to pay homage. There’s Bhrome, which changes every instance of the letter C to the [B] emoji, Thicc, which is pretty self explanatory, and OWO, which is way more difficult to explain for the uninitiated. I tried to use all of them at once and my laptop exploded.
And I have absolutely saved the best for last. Allow me to introduce you to Millennials To Snake People by Eric Bailey, the only Chrome extension that will end the think pieces once and for all. Never again will you have to hear Business Insider tell you about how your generation is killing the bar soap industry – instead, every economist is instantly transformed into a conspiracy theorist. Hissssss.