Artblock

Every ad on the internet, replaced with fine art.

Artblock is a Chrome extension that detects advertisements, sponsored content, affiliate widgets, and promotional clutter on the pages you visit and swaps them for artwork from three public, open-access collections:

• 🏛 Art Institute of Chicago — paintings, Japanese woodblock prints, photography (Monet, Hokusai, O'Keeffe, and thousands more)
• 🏛 The Metropolitan Museum of Art — centuries of painting, sculpture, and design
• 🌌 NASA Image Library — nebulae, galaxies, Earthrise, the Pillars of Creation

Features

• Detects Google Ads, DoubleClick, Amazon, Taboola/Outbrain, MGID, RevContent, sponsored content, affiliate widgets, newsletter/paywall prompts
• Categories: Impressionism, Japanese Woodblock, Renaissance, Photography, Modern/Contemporary, NASA Space, or Chaos Mode
• Never shows you the same image twice in a session
• Hover any replaced slot to see the title, artist, date, and source museum
• Per-tab toolbar badge counts how many ads have been replaced on the current page

Install

From the Chrome Web Store / Firefox Add-ons

(Coming soon on both.)

Unpacked (development)

Chrome / Edge / Brave

1. Clone this repo: `git clone
2. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode
3. Click Load unpacked, select the repo root
4. Visit any ad-supported site — the replacements happen automatically

Firefox

1. Clone the repo
2. Run ./build.sh — produces artblock-firefox-v1.0.0.zip
3. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox → Load Temporary Add-on → select the zip (or the repo's manifest.firefox.json)

Building release packages

./build.sh

Produces artblock-chrome-vX.Y.Z.zip and artblock-firefox-vX.Y.Z.zip, ready to upload to their respective stores. The Firefox build uses manifest.firefox.json, which adds browser_specific_settings.gecko.id (required by AMO) and an event-page background.scripts declaration for compatibility with Firefox 109+.

How it works

• content/detector.js scans the DOM for ad containers via curated CSS selectors and IAB ad-size heuristics, skipping nested matches so only the outermost ad slot is replaced.
• content/observer.js watches for dynamically-injected ads via MutationObserver.
• content/replacer.js swaps each detected slot for an `` sized to fit, with a hover tooltip showing the artwork metadata.
• background/service-worker.js fetches art metadata from the three public APIs and caches it per aspect-ratio bucket in chrome.storage.local, so replacements are instant and never repeat within a session.

Privacy

Artblock collects nothing. No analytics, no accounts, no telemetry, no browsing history. The only outbound requests it makes are to the three public museum/NASA APIs, and those requests carry nothing but a generic search term. See PRIVACY.md.

Credits

Artwork and imagery are sourced from the open-access programs of the [A