If you’re a football fanatic and are already readying the earplugs to stop co-workers and friends from discussing the game until you get home, there may be at least a way to stop your browser from letting you see the scores.
Created by one of Australia’s TV streaming companies, the fix to your World Cup spoilers comes in the form of an extension to Google’s Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browser called “Spoiler Spoiler,” with a detection system for words and images suggesting FIFA World Cup information and a way of blocking it out.
Blocking your screen is literally a block of colour, with yellow and green — or the colours of your favourite team — thrown up in front of you to stop you from seeing anything.
You can click through it if you like, revealing the potential spoilers, and even these will be blocked up with yellow and green strips of colour that can be removed with a simple click.
“Whether your team wins or loses, it’s so frustrating to find out the result online before you’ve had a chance to watch the game, but with Spoiler Spoiler you no longer have to worry,” said Sue Brenchley, Fetch TV’s Marketing Director.
It’s not a completely perfect plugin, we need to stress that, and in our tests we found it blocked some mentions of it, but warned us about the possibility of World Cup references on pages that probably didn’t have any, such as the Wikipedia entry for “Ella Fitzgerald.” As you do.
And even on the GadgetGuy site, there were quite a few things to block, which took us by surprise.
But the good news is that it’s free, and you can turn it off whenever you want, so that’s positive. Plus it has the potential to help you out, especially if trying to avoid results is actually a problem for you.
Fetch TV’s Spoiler Spoiler extension for web browsers is available now for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
