People have always found ways to pretend they are working when evidently they are not. Most people will head over to the internet to catch up on social media or Youtube during regular office hours. This is a frowned upon habit especially if you have strict bosses or nosy coworkers who are not cool with you wasting very precious hours lazily browsing the web. These Chrome extensions will help you hide your browsing activities from patrolling bosses.
MSOutlookit
This is a Reddit skin that disguises Reddit to look like Outlook. It masks Redditor names with professionally sounding names with titles like Tom from Legal and Brian from Talent Acquisition. Thread titles become subject headers and the New email button lets you add new subreddits. So the next time your co-worker or boss hovers over your desk, they’ll think you’re replying to client’s email but you’re busy scrolling through your favourite subreddits.
Stylish
Stylish is chrome and firefox extension that conceals what you’re looking at. There are several styles including dark and grey. My favourite one is the Facebook one that turns Mark Zuckerberg’s platform into a boring dull-looking website. It even hides the images and videos up until you hover over them. It hides Facebook’s blue colours so that if someone is watching from a distance won’t know you’re scrolling through your favourite group’s memes or bad puns like me. 
Decreased Productivity
Another extension that works similarly is Decreased Productivity that changes text and background colour of close to almost every website. The extension also hides images so someone who looks closely at your desk won’t know what website you’re on. 
Slack-like Twitter
This extension disguises Twitter to look like popular messaging app Slack that most offices use. While I actually use Twitter for work, other people aren’t so lucky. The gif in this tweet actually shows how it works.
Meanwhile in Japan: This person created an Chrome extension makes Twitter screen to look like Slack so he can appear working while using Twitter. 🤣💯 https://t.co/nyqcaUXBil
— Kiyo Yamauchi 🍱 (@kiyotoshi_y) November 19, 2018
Sadly, the extension isn’t out already as Chanchii is still developing it but it looks pretty good. He plans to release within the year and an English version is on the way too. We can’t wait!
Panic Button
This extension lets you browse your normal websites but it has a panic button that you press when someone peeks in your screen to see what you’ve been up to. The extension hides all your recent tabs at once by the click of a button. The extension icon then turns green and shows the number of tabs hidden. To restore, just click the button again. The F4 button is the extension’s keyboard shortcut that does the same too.
Happy browsing!
