Settings Reference

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Settings reference

Open the popup from the toolbar icon for the common switches, or All settings for the full page. Everything is stored per browser profile and, if your browser syncs extension data, roams between your own devices.

General

Setting	Default	What it does
Blur enabled	on	Master switch. Off means the extension does nothing at all.
Blur strength	6px	Blur radius for text. Pictures get roughly 1.75× that, because an image needs a stronger blur than a line of text before it stops being readable.
Fade in and out	on	Animates the blur over 160 ms instead of switching instantly.

Revealing

Setting	Default	What it does
Reveal on hover	on	Move the pointer over a blurred element to read just that one.
Hover delay	0 ms	Wait before revealing, so passing the pointer across the screen does not flash your messages. Try 300–500 ms.
Hold a key to reveal everything	off	While the key is down, the whole screen is readable.
Reveal key	Alt	Alt / Option, Ctrl or Shift.

Automatic blur

Both of these override the master switch: if you left blurring off and walk away, they turn it back on. They also suppress hover and hold-to-reveal, so nothing stays uncovered while you are not there.

Setting	Default	What it does
Blur when the window loses focus	off	Re-blurs the moment another window comes to the front, or the tab is hidden.
Blur after a period of inactivity	off	Re-blurs after the timeout with no pointer or keyboard activity.
Inactivity timeout	60 s	Between 5 s and 1 hour.

What to blur

Nine independent switches.

Switch	Covers
Chat list names and previews	Conversation names, last-message previews, the sender prefix in a group preview, and the archive row's subtitle
Chat list profile pictures	Avatars in the list, story avatars, the archive folder avatar
Conversation header	The open conversation's name and photo
Message text	Bubble text, quoted reply text, link and document card titles
Sender names in groups	Who wrote each message, and the author of a quoted reply
Photos, videos and stickers	Images, video thumbnails, stickers, big emoji, document thumbnails
Sender profile pictures	Avatars beside messages
What you are typing (off by default)	The composer
Profile and info panels	Member rows, their avatars, and shared-media thumbnails

Deliberately left readable

Message timestamps, unread badges and reply counts. They are what makes a blurred screen still usable, and none of them reveals content.

Keyboard shortcut

Alt+Shift+B toggles blurring across every open Bale tab.

Rebind it at chrome://extensions/shortcuts, or in Firefox at about:addons → gear icon → Manage Extension Shortcuts.

Advanced selectors

Bale changes its markup from time to time. Rather than wait for a release, you can add your own CSS selectors under any category — one per line. See Selector Maintenance for how to find the right one.

Input is validated before it reaches the page: braces, <, ;, @, backslashes, comment markers and commas are rejected. Commas specifically, because each custom selector is prefixed with the extension's own state gate and a comma would let the second half escape it and blur the entire page.

Backup

Export settings writes a JSON file; Import settings reads one back. Imported files go through the same validation as stored settings, so a hand-edited file can only ever produce in-range values. Reset to defaults does what it says.