You know how on social media you can mute keywords and phrases that you’re not interested in? Well, have you ever wished you could do it on the whole internet? Now you can.

So, this is a brand new app called Filtre. But the idea is you can add keywords, and it will block them out of anything that you browse in Safari on your iPad or your iPhone. So, let’s have a look at how this works.

I’m going to open up Safari here. And as I browse through The Verge, there are loads of stories about AI. Now, for this demo, let’s try and get rid of all of the AI stories and see if we can make that work.

So, I’m going to open up the Filtre app, and then from here, we’re going to choose the keywords we want to block. You can add these into Filter Sets, so perhaps for work, or for home, or for school, or just put them all into one general place, but you can turn them on and off in those groups. It’s good to know for later. So, here I’m going to add AI, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, Gemini, all of those sort of words that might come up in a blog post or a website about AI.

Then at this stage, we need to enable the extension in the Safari app. So we’ll jump into Safari and we’ll press the extensions button in the menu bar here. Because the app is installed already, it should show up as an option and we can simply toggle it on. You may need to grant it permission at this stage to see what pages you’re browsing. Just press Allow to all of those, because that way it will work across the whole internet.

And now if I reload theverge.com, you’re going to see a whole bunch of empty spaces where different stories have been completely removed from view. This is really cool, because now those AI stories aren’t bothering me. And if you perhaps wanted to avoid spoilers for a TV show or a football match coming up, then you could always add those keywords as well, so that they’re not spoiling the things for you that you don’t want to see.

But if you don’t want to have completely empty spaces on the website, there are some different options in Filtre as well. And here you can choose to have the results faded out or in grayscale mode. And that will do essentially exactly what you think it will. You can still see the articles, you can still see the blog posts, the news stories, but they’re either going to be grey or faded away. So, it kind of immediately lets you know that perhaps you don’t want to click on that one. It’s not relevant to what you’re interested in right now.

I’ve been using Filtre for a couple of days and it’s really nice. It syncs between the iPhone and the iPad. And it’s a really great one to try if you want to have some low-level filtering on your device.

This is no replacement for network-level filtering, for sure. So, don’t be using it in a school thinking that’s your filtering sorted. It really isn’t. But it is a great way of hiding spoilers and just removing things that you don’t want to see when you’re browsing on Safari.

And hey, if you enjoyed this QuickTip, I think you’re probably going to like this one next.