The trendy web is stuffed with annoyances designed to make your expertise worse. Websites disable copying, right-clicks, and shove all types of huge banners and autoplaying movies in your face, even after they cover the content material you are there for. If this sort of factor bothers you, and also you occur to browse in your iPhone or Mac, there’s a answer: the StopTheMadness Professional app ($15). It really works with Safari in your iPhone or Mac, and with Firefox and Chrome for Mac.
StopTheMadness Professional is a one-stop answer to reclaiming the web. It has so many options that it is laborious to record them multi function article, however I will spotlight those I like essentially the most (for context, I primarily use it with Safari on Mac). If my transient rundown is not sufficient for you, as soon as you put in the extension, you can too in fact click on its icon within the toolbar to see every part it will possibly do. This generally is a bit overwhelming, for the reason that Normal tab itself lists over 50 options, however the extension allows an excellent set of defaults to get you began. If you do not have the time to instantly try each characteristic, the defaults and my suggestions will nonetheless care for numerous annoyances for you.
That stated, as soon as you’re able to experiment extra, you’ll be able to go to StopTheMadness Professional’s web site to study extra about every characteristic. Observe that, when on Chrome and Firefox, the app makes use of a non-standard set up technique, however you’ll be able to simply observe the prompts within the app to put in and replace the extension at any time when wanted.
Regain management over movies on the web
Credit score: Pranay Parab
My favourite characteristic in StopTheMadness Professional is its capability to cease autoplaying movies on all web sites. Although I’ve disabled autoplay in all my browsers’ settings, I’ve seen that many web sites do not respect this choice. They use customized video gamers that make it laborious to cease playback, and typically these movies begin taking part in at full voume. StopTheMadness Professional’s Normal tab has a characteristic known as “Cease autoplaying audio and video,” which has labored on all of the web sites I’ve visited since enabling it. As an illustration, I go to a web site for sports activities scores that has a behavior of embedding a stay stream of its postgame evaluation into different posts. This begins taking part in unmuted even when I am not actively on the stay weblog tab. StopTheMadness Professional was capable of block this, which is a giant reduction.
The extension may make YouTube very usable for you. It might probably skip adverts, present the picture-in-picture button even when you do not have YouTube Premium, set the default video high quality, and routinely allow subtitles for you. Coupled with that, it will possibly power all web sites to make use of the native audio and video controls in your iPhone and Mac. Because of this in case you dislike YouTube’s customized video participant (or that of another website), you should use Apple’s native controls as an alternative.
Block monitoring and annoyances
Credit score: Pranay Parab
On the Mac, you should use StopTheMadness Professional’s keyboard shortcuts to carry out helpful capabilities akin to copying a hyperlink with out clicking or right-clicking it. Hover the cursor over a hyperlink and press Command-C to repeat it. Try the extension’s Keyboard part to see different helpful shortcuts, however that is not all. The Tab Guidelines part permits you to resolve what occurs when you click on a hyperlink. You possibly can power the browser to open it in the identical tab, a background tab, in a brand new energetic tab, and even open some hyperlinks within the browser of your alternative.
After I first purchased this extension a couple of years in the past, it was to avoid copy-paste blocks on web sites and to bypass Google’s AMP pages on my iPhone. It nonetheless does these issues fairly nicely, and you should use it to reclaim the flexibility to right-click, copy, and paste on web sites that block it. Since then, it is developed to dam many different annoyances, such because the hideous “Register with Google” pop-up that seems on Reddit and plenty of different websites. It additionally removes monitoring parameters from most hyperlinks you click on, and in case it will possibly’t take away them, you’ll be able to go to the extension’s Trackers tab and add the mandatory parameters manually. StopTheMadness Professional may routinely broaden shortened URLs for you, thereby stopping hyperlink monitoring through URL shorteners.
Though this extension just isn’t an adblocker, it additionally means that you can cover annoyances on any webpage with its aspect hiding characteristic. Click on the Disguise Web page Aspect button after opening the extension through the toolbar, and choose the annoyance you want to block.
What do you assume to date?
Superior options value testing
Credit score: Pranay Parab
Earlier than attending to the superior options, it is value mentioning that StopTheMadness Professional helps site-specific settings, too. In its Normal tab on Mac, you may see a + button subsequent to My default choices for all web sites. You possibly can click on that button so as to add site-specific settings for the web site you are on. Whenever you’re utilizing the extension in your iPhone, this selection seems within the Web site part of the extension’s menu. This allows you to create customized preferences for web sites that you just frequent.
For those who’re a fan of tinkering with each side of your net searching expertise, you should use this extension so as to add customized CSS or JavaScript code, change default fonts with your individual selections, or so as to add JavaScript snippets (as a substitute for bookmarklets). The Customized Code part permits you to customise web sites utilizing CSS or JavaScript code, which is able to run routinely each time a web page is loaded. Nevertheless, the JavaScript Snippets characteristic within the Scripts tab is for code you’d reasonably run manually.
I additionally just like the Net Guidelines part of the extension, which permits me to open hyperlinks from sure web sites in a browser of my alternative. I discover that Chrome or its derivatives deal with Google Docs or Sheets so much higher than Safari, and I used this to redirect all these hyperlinks to a distinct browser.
It isn’t typically that one comes throughout a strong browser extension that works so nicely. StopTheMadness Professional is outstanding and I think about it a must have for anybody who browses the net on Apple units. It undoubtedly has a studying curve, however the developer’s spectacular documentation makes it very easy to study extra about each obtainable characteristic.
