You are on your favorite chat or browsing your favorite social media when suddenly a wild and scary image of a spider appears! PhobiaBlocker lets you enjoy a phobia free web.
PhobiaBlocker blocks scary images of your phobia. Choose what to block from a long list of physical things.
Features
• Automatically block images representing physical things you chose
• Manually block or unblock images with a right-click
• Automatically block or trust (for performance saving) images whose src matches a given regex (blocking has priority)
• Add trusted websites (domain name with sub domain) for performance saving
Options
• Quick selection to block spider-like and insect-like images
• Advanced selection from a long list of physical things
• Speed/Accuracy tradeoff of the automatic blocker
• Risk management of the automatic blocker
• Add or remove a regex to automatically trust or block images using their src
• Enable dark or light mode (dark mode by default)
• Pause the automatic blocker (manual blocking is still enabled)
• Label trusted website from the popup
Privacy
• No browsing data is sent to an external endpoint.
• Images are analysed on your computer but there are not saved in any way.
Technical details and restrictions
• To analyse images Machine Learning models for imagenet classification are used. The list of things to block comes from imagenet classes. This is why there are only physical things. For instance blocking abstract phobia like fear of heights or gore is not supported.
• Are analysed and svg elements . When a new image is added to the DOM or is changing, the element is also analysed. Images from canvas and css property background-image are not supported.
• Images are first temporary blocked before their analyse. Images can sometimes blink before being temporary blocked.
• More than 99% of the size of the extension come from the Machine Learning models.
As a bonus a little surprise for Tibetan Mastiff lovers! (Can be disabled in the options)
I love the idea and I think it could help many people to make their online presence a little bit less anxious. However, the current version (1.2.0 from 10th of May 2020) is a huge performance burden on your browser and therefore probably only worth it for rather extreme phobias (or if you have a lot of performance to spare while browsing)
(Note to the developer: I’m a data scientist myself, so I understand that you probably cannot do much about the network size and therefore this performance problem, but just be aware that this is probably your biggest problem here. I almost immediately uninstalled the extension after trying it out, since I am just not willing to give up all this performance for a little more comfort on the web)
Another thing that is a major problem, but would fortunately be much easier to fix, I guess, is that images appear for a short flash before they are blocked. Of course some people, who are only discomforted *while* a phobia-inducing image is shown, probably prefer seeing all images instantly and the extension only blocking them one-by-one after it detects phobia content, but other people are probably too frightened even by a short flash of phobia content and therefore prefer the extension blocking all images by default and then only slowly reenabling them as soon as they are checked and confirmed to be harmless. A setting for this would be nice.
The last major problem, which is probably almost impossible to solve, while maintaining a sensible performance cost, is that video material is not analyzed.
Generally I love the idea and it is fairly well implemented here. The main restrictions are likely today’s technical limitations, but if this extension is being kept up to date while PC performance increases and machine learning techniques are getting more efficient and/or some problem-specific, creative solutions are implemented to lower the performance cost, this might become a great extension and draw a large user baser (I know many people personally who would love such a tool)