StopTheMadness 4+

Take back your web browser

Jeff Johnson

    • 4.8 • 398 Ratings
    • $11.99

Screenshots

Description

IMPORTANT: New customers should purchase StopTheMadness Pro rather than StopTheMadness, which will receive no new features.

StopTheMadness is an extension for Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Chromium browsers that stops web sites from making your browser harder to use. And it protects your privacy on the web. StopTheMadness is not an ad blocker: it offers unique features not available from ad blockers or any other apps. StopTheMadness is one of a kind!

Made by indie developer Jeff Johnson. The support link has documentation and my email address.

Many web sites deliberately disable user interface features in your browser that you normally expect to work. StopTheMadness re-enables those features for you in your browser:
• ⌘-click and middle-click to open a link in a new tab
• ⌘-key keyboard shortcuts
• opening contextual menus
• selecting, copying, cutting, and pasting of text
• drag and drop
• AutoFill/autocomplete of passwords, emails, etc.

StopTheMadness also protects your privacy on the web:
• Removes tracking tags such as utm_source, gclid, and fbclid from the end of URLs.
• Stops clickjacking in Google Search, Gmail, Facebook, and DuckDuckGo.
• Stops hyperlink auditing by removing the anchor "ping" attribute on link clicks.
• Stops tracking beacons (Navigator.sendBeacon).
• Stops sites from using the Page Visibility API to know when a tab is visible on your screen.

Bonus Features:
• Stop videos from autoplaying. This works even on sites where the browser's autoplay preferences don't work.
• Automatically skip YouTube video ads.
• Show native video controls. Use AirPlay or Picture-in-Picture from Safari on sites that don't normally support it.
• Automatically select web video speed.
• Automatically select video quality on YouTube.
• Font replacement. Substitute one font for another on web pages.
• Add your own site-specific CSS and JavaScript to web pages.
• Custom URL redirects.
• Stops "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" alerts. Close your tabs without getting stopped by the site.
• Force links to open in the current tab instead of a new tab. Remove target="_blank" from links so that they no longer automatically create a new tab.
• Force links to open in a new tab instead of the current tab. This is great if you're scrolling through a list of links and want to open each one in a new tab.
• Force images to the front. Bypass the transparent overlay on sites such as Instagram that prevents you from dragging and opening the contextual menu on images.
• Warns when you paste or type beyond the maximum length in a password field or other text field. Stops you from accidentally losing characters. (Feature not available in Firefox.)
• ⌘-c to copy link URL on hover. Much easier than opening the contextual menu. Also ⌘-x to copy link title on hover.
• ⌘-delete on hover to delete any HTML element on the page. If something is in your way, temporarily remove it.
• Stop ⌘-left-arrow from unexpectedly sending you back to the previous page in your browsing history.
• Stop scrolljacking.
• Stop sites from using JavaScript to track the movement of your mouse pointer.

Safari-specific Features:
• Stops URL shorteners. Checks the links you click in Safari for well-known link shorteners — bit.ly, tinyurl.com, t.co (used by Twitter), etc. — and loads the unshortened destination URL instead of the shortened URL. This occurs without setting any cookies or other site data, so you can't be tracked by your click.
• Stop Safari from automatically submitting login forms. AutoFill login forms and then make changes such as checking "Remember Me" or take CAPTCHA tests before submitting.
• Automatically open clicked links in other apps. You can specify rules in StopTheMadness such as open https://docs.google.com links in Google Chrome. Or even don't open https://facebook.com links at all, to keep you from accidentally opening Facebook.
• ⌘-v when hovering over a link to open the link with the app selected in the "Open Link with" popup.

What’s New

Version 40.10

• Show native controls: Fixed unmuting on Twitter
• Show native controls: Fixed some videos playing only audio on twitter.com
• Show native controls: Fixed an infinite loop on sports.tj with showing and hiding the video controls
• Stop autoplaying video: Improved handling of videos with no video source
• Video Highlight: Make all videos opaque, in case they're currently transparent
• Bypass link shorteners: Fixed escaping of ampersands in meta http-equiv refresh
• Protect tab closing and page visibility: Fixed the error "Permissions policy violation: unload is not allowed in this document" in the Chrome Extensions window. The unload event has been deprecated by Chrome.
• Worked around a Firefox bug in the Add-ons Manager window Preferences where horizontal lines appeared as dots

Ratings and Reviews

4.8 out of 5
398 Ratings

398 Ratings

Bifferooni ,

Well-Behaved Browsing

If you look at the StopTheMadness feature list, you will see numerous, seemingly small website behaviors that StopTheMadness adjusts to be more in keeping with standard Mac behaviors. You may not notice it at first, but StopTheMadness really does bring sanity back to browsing by disabling website "features" that disrespect user expectations of how websites work. Sure, you may encounter an occasional site that won't work well with STM's defaults, but if the site is important to you, you probably can tweak a setting or just temporarily disable STM while on that site. To be fair, I can't remember the last time I needed to do that, though. Kudos to the developer for a useful, thoughtful solution to a complex set of challenges!

OldManSaturn ,

Look Past the Price

At first glance, $10 for a really low profile utility app seems crazy but consider this: Web Developer are purposefully acting against the best interest of users more and more everyday, you don't realize how much ground they've taken because it comes to you in tiny incremenets.

With this application, you get all of that power given back to you immediately and forever, and all you have to do is buy it once for what is for most people a relatively irrelevant amount of money.

It's one of those things that you didn't know you needed it until you got it and then you can't be without it .

TheOriginalTim ,

This app shouldn't be necessary, but it is

We shouldn't have to have an app to give us back control of our own web browsers, but give a web developer an inch and he'll take a mile. It's nice to have sanity restored and be able to do the normal things that computers have been able to do for decades. Copy and paste!

The one feature I'd love to see added is to block the "Wait, don't go!" pop-ups that happen just because the mouse moves to the title bar. So annoying! It's bad web design and eventually designers will stop doing it (I hope), but until then, that's the one feature this app could add to make it golden. The features it has right now are worth the purchase.

App Privacy

The developer, Jeff Johnson, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Supports

  • Family Sharing

    Up to six family members can use this app with Family Sharing enabled.

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