Most keyword-muting guides focus on a single site like Reddit, Twitter, or YouTube. Often, though, you want to block a word, name, or topic everywhere it appears, including news comment sections, shopping sites, forums, and work tools.
This guide covers how to mute words at the browser level on any website using ElementHider.
Three Ways to Mute Something
1. Keyword matching (the default)
Type a word or phrase and ElementHider scans visible text on every page you load, hiding, blurring, or (with the Supporter Pack) replacing any element that contains a match. This covers most cases, including comment sections, article previews, forum posts, and product listings.
Add the word or phrase
Type it into the extension popup. No site restriction is needed unless you want one; a keyword applies everywhere by default.
Choose case sensitivity
"Ignore case" is on by default, so Spoiler and spoiler both match. Turn it off for something like an acronym where case matters (IT the department vs. it the pronoun).
Choose exact match if the word is short or common
Short keywords can over-match inside longer words. "Exact match" (word-boundary matching) prevents ad from also matching "advice" or "add".
2. Point-and-click CSS selectors
Some things aren't a word at all, such as a specific widget, a recurring ad slot, a "Recommended" sidebar, or a comment section you want to hide on a particular site. ElementHider's point-and-click picker lets you click any element directly on the page and generate a CSS selector rule for it without writing CSS yourself.
This is the right tool when the thing you want gone is a page layout element rather than specific text, since it keeps working even when the text inside that element changes.
3. Regex matching (Supporter Pack)
For patterns rather than fixed words (such as scorelines, numeric stock banners, or multiple spelling variants of a name), regular expressions match a pattern instead of one literal string. Regex rules are included in the Supporter Pack for cases where a single keyword rule isn't flexible enough.
| Method | Best for | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword | Specific words, names, phrases | Free |
| CSS selector (point-and-click) | Recurring page elements/widgets | Free |
| Regexp | Patterns, variants, and structured text | Supporter Pack |
| Groups (toggle sets of rules at once) | Organizing rules by topic/site/season | Supporter Pack |
Organizing Rules as They Grow
A handful of keywords is easy to manage in one list. Once you're filtering dozens of terms across multiple sites for different reasons, Groups (Supporter Pack) let you bundle related rules together and toggle a whole group on or off in one click, instead of deleting and re-adding individual entries.
Tip: Organizing groups by purpose rather than by site works well: for example, a "Spoilers" group for shows you're behind on and a "Shopping" group for sponsored labels. You can then toggle a group off whenever you don't need it.
Test Mode Before You Commit
Before hiding something, ElementHider's Test Mode outlines matches on the page without removing them. That lets you confirm a new keyword or selector matches what you expect before switching it to Hide or Blur.
The Bottom Line
Across any website, you can combine the same three tools: keywords for words and phrases, CSS selectors for page elements, and regex for text patterns, all managed from one list.