PureWord vs Advanced Profanity Filter

Quick answer

Short answer: Both extensions clean page text on every site visited. Advanced Profanity Filter is the established option with cross browser builds and audio muting on supported streaming sites. PureWord is the newer lightweight option for shared devices with password held settings. Match the choice to the room the browser sits in.

Facts on record

Store and repository dates below were checked in October 2026. They change with releases, so the listings remain the source of truth.

A third listing named Profanity-Blocker shows version 1.5 updated August 2022 with a few hundred users. It is not compared in detail here because it has not shipped publicly for years.

Scope is the real difference

Advanced Profanity Filter covers page text plus audio muting on supported video sites through captions, with separate word lists per site and three modes for censor, substitute and remove. PureWord covers page text only with masking or clean replacements, filtering everywhere except excluded sites. Where the page itself is the problem rather than its words, neither filter fits and Profanity Filters vs Site Blockers explains which tool fits.

Browsers and households

Advanced Profanity Filter ships for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera and Android, so one setup travels across devices. PureWord ships for Chrome and Edge and also runs on Brave, Opera and Vivaldi builds, which suits a household or classroom that standardised on Chromium. For YouTube comments specifically, our YouTube guide covers what caption muters miss.

Privacy surface

Any page filter must be able to read pages, so permissions matter more than summaries. Advanced Profanity Filter is open source so behaviour can be read rather than trusted. PureWord requests storage, tabs, context menus and alarms plus one host permission for its public word list, and that word list is its only network request. See the privacy policy for the full statement.

Settings that stay on

PureWord holds Parental Lock as its central control with a PBKDF2 hashed password, a one time recovery code and escalating lockouts after failed attempts. The options page locks and the popup toggle disables while locked. This is the feature that matters most on a computer shared with children, and it is why schools combine forced install with a password rather than relying on goodwill. Setup for managed devices is covered in how to make school Chromebooks safe.

Measured cover and honest gaps

Eighteen written evasion patterns were run through the current PureWord engine in replacement mode. Ten were filtered. Hyphens, full stops and underscores between letters were removed before matching while spaces, slashes, repeated letters, most symbols and reversed text were not filtered. Unicode cover reached a handful of lookalikes for one letter. The same gaps exist in any word list filter of this kind, so add exact spellings as custom words rather than trusting normalisation. Ordinary prose stayed intact with zero of 1,289 words altered outside quoted examples.

Which one to install

• If the browser is shared with children. Take PureWord, because a password on the options page is the control that matters most here.
• If video needs muting as well as text. Take Advanced Profanity Filter, which reads captions on supported streaming sites.
• If the household uses several browsers. Take Advanced Profanity Filter for cross browser builds.
• If the device fleet is Chromium only. Take PureWord for a smaller package with forced install by organisational unit.
• If different sites need different lists. Take Advanced Profanity Filter for per site lists. PureWord filters everywhere and excludes sites wholesale.

FAQ

Summary

Advanced Profanity Filter is the established cross browser option with video muting and per site lists. PureWord is the newer lightweight option for shared Chromium devices with password held settings. Pick the scope that matches the room the browser sits in, then add the spellings that household actually meets as custom words.

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