Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker

New York Times on incognito without and with our extension
Our Extension Popup

Inspiration

We love to read articles online for either school, fun, or entertainment, but we absolutely hate it when sites like the New York Times or Techcrunch throws up a paywall or an annoying blocker telling me to turn off adblock or get off incognito mode. For years we've been spending time scratching our heads trying to find a clever way of bypassing these restrictions using the browser, but today we've had enough and are building a long-term solution to this problem!

What it does

Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker is a chrome extension that allows users to toggle which sites to block annoying paywalls, authwalls, incognitowalls, and adblockerwalls. You can click "click block this site" on our chrome extension to bypass these walls on your browser. You can also type in domains to block or to allow. Your settings will be synced across all of your devices running our chrome extension.

How we built it

We used html to render our chrome extension and javascript to perform all the logic required. To block the different content walls, we used a variety of different functions on the _ chrome.contentSettings _ api.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to set up communication between the extension popup and the background process due to permission issues. It was difficult to align what we wanted our extension to do with the fact that the popup code was only accessible when the popup was open. It was also challenging to figure out how to use the _ chrome.contentSettings _ api.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team worked really well to deliver our final product. The Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker successfully does what we want on most news sites, and the UI looks good and easy to use. Lots of people we showed our project to demonstrated interest in using our extension in the future.

What we learned

We learned about how to build a chrome extension! We also learned about how ad blockers, paywalls, and authwalls work. Beyond this, we learned how to communicate and work effectively as a team on a multifaceted project: it involved front-end, back-end, design, and more.