How to mark all links on a page as read in Chrome

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 1, 2015
Google Chrome, Google Chrome extensions
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If you visit websites like Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt or other news type of sites regularly, you may have noticed that it is difficult on some to keep up with the flow of news.

While that is not really a problem on your first visit, you may find it difficult to continue where you stopped the last time as many sites do not mark that or provide you with options to do that by yourself.

There are ways around this. You could open the newest linked article or item each time before you leave the site to mark it as read, or bookmark it instead if you prefer that option.

The Google Chrome extension Mark All As Read automates the first solution somewhat. It adds an icon to Chrome after installation which marks all items read on the page you are on when activated.

If you visit Reddit's frontpage for example and click on the Mark All As Read button in Chrome, all news articles on that page are marked as read.

chrome mark as read

How that is done? It adds all link anchors to Chrome's history to ensure that. While that turns all links into visited links, it means that all links on the page end up in Chrome's browsing history.

This is certainly not something for anyone, especially if you use the browsing history regularly, for instance when you type in Chrome's address bar and select suggestions from it as all read items will show up there if they match what you type.

You mitigate that somewhat by clearing your browsing history regularly but if you don't do that for whatever reason, you end up with a massive list of visited sites in your history that you never visited and may clutter suggestions and the history itself if you browse it manually or use its search feature.

If you don't mind the side-effect, or like it even, for instance if you want to keep a reference to all linked sites, then you will certainly appreciate the extension.

A second click on the icon marks all links as unread again. This lags somewhat currently and I had to press the button multiple times for the links to become unread again.

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Comments

  1. Dave said on March 2, 2015 at 9:20 am
    Reply

    For Reddit I use a Tampermonkey script called Reddit Hide All. Click it to hide everything on the page so you won’t see it again and there’s no history cleaning to do. http://pastebin.com/72JEV519

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