Here's How to Avoid All Star Wars Spoilers This Week

Star Wars: The Force Awakens 

premiered this week in Los Angeles and opens nationwide on December 18, but not everyone can see it at the same time. Spoiler culture is at its peak, not only on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but in bold headlines of news outlets that want to break stories first. Unplugging from the Internet for days until you can see the film is less than ideal, but out of Google Chrome comes a new hope.

The Force Block Chrome extension claims to block spoilers for the film with something called "smart pattern detection and a whitelist for false alarms." According to The Verge, the extension is more of an all-encompassing filter that sends a warning message with a clever film reference for any site that mentions the film (so if you already have it installed, you probably can't see this post). When we tested the extension at mental_floss, Facebook and Twitter went unblocked. As did StarWars.com and NYTimes.com, but StarWars.com/news and the Arts section of The New York Times each resulted in spoiler warnings. The whitelist feature allows users to mark any site as safe and proceed to the desired online content.

Judging the effectiveness of the blocker by visiting a handful of sites is by no means a full review, so go check it out for yourself.

Chrome browser screenshot using the Force Block extension

Chrome browser screenshot using the Force Block extension

[h/t The Verge]