Hour 11 of the fifth season of Breaking Bad. Your eyes are bloodshot. You’ve barely moved, riveted by the drama. The sun has set and the room’s too dark, but you can’t bring yourself to pause your streaming marathon and flip a light switch. Up pops a brief message on the blue glow of your Netflix screen:
Continue watching?
Cue shame.
By default, Netflix checks in with users every once in a while with questions in the vein of “are you sure you want to keep watching?” if it seems they’ve been streaming a lot of episodes of a show in a row without interruption. Some viewers may appreciate the gentle nudge. Others, not so much.
Those in the latter category can download Flix Assist, a new Chrome extension that handily stops the “continue watching” messages from appearing. The extension also gets rid of the short countdown that appears between episodes when credits roll. Similar extensions already exist, but Flix Assist seems to work the most seamlessly thus far. ”No longer will I feel self-conscious after binge-watching away my day,” one reviewer reports.
“Another first world problem dropped of the list,” says another. “Life is good.”
So there you go.