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Chrome extension provides easy button to close overlay pop-ups

BehindTheOverlay provides a consistent button and keyboard shortcut to close those annoying website overlays.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
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Matt Elliott

There are enough distractions on the Web before we even get to the overlays that some sites hit you with, asking you to register, take a survey, sign up for a newsletter, or some-such. And while most overlays put the close button in the upper-right corner, some diabolical Webmasters have become masterful at disguising the X button that lets you close the overlay and enter the site.

behindtheoverlay.jpg
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

If you use Chrome, the BehindTheOverlay extension can help you in your battle against overlay pop-ups. The extension simply installs a button to the right of Chrome's URL bar that you can click to close an overlay that you encounter. BehindTheOverlay just works; it does not require you to sign up for an account or restart Chrome.

And if you head to Tools > Extensions in Chrome and scroll down to the bottom of your list of extensions, you'll see a Keyboard Shortcuts link. Click it and you'll be able to assign a keyboard shortcut to BehindTheOverlay you can use to kill overlays.

behindtheoverlay-keyboard-shortcut.jpg
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

If you'd like to test it out, the developer has a far-from-exhaustive list on GitHub where the extension has been tested to work. And on BehindTheOverlay's page in the Chrome Web Store, the developer states that a Firefox version is coming soon.

Via TheNextWeb.