This App Gets Rid of Autoplaying Videos, Trackers, and Other Modern Browsing Annoyances

The modern internet is full of annoyances designed to make your experience worse. Sites disable copying, right-clicks, and shove all kinds of massive banners and autoplaying videos in your face, even when they hide the content you're there for. If this kind of thing bothers you, and you happen to browse on your iPhone or Mac, there is a solution: the StopTheMadness Pro app ($15). It works with Safari on your iPhone or Mac, and with Firefox and Chrome for Mac. 

StopTheMadness Pro is a one-stop solution to reclaiming the internet. It has so many features that it's hard to list them all in one article, but I'll highlight the ones I like the most (for context, I primarily use it with Safari on Mac). If my brief rundown isn't enough for you, once you install the extension, you can also of course click its icon in the toolbar to see everything it can do. This can be a bit overwhelming, since the General tab itself lists over 50 features, but the extension enables a good set of defaults to get you started. If you don't have the time to immediately check out every feature, the defaults and my recommendations will still take care of a large number of annoyances for you.

That said, once you are ready to experiment more, you can go to StopTheMadness Pro's website to learn more about each feature. Note that, when on Chrome and Firefox, the app uses a non-standard installation method, but you can easily follow the prompts in the app to install and update the extension whenever needed.

Regain control over videos on the internet

Credit: Pranay Parab

My favorite feature in StopTheMadness Pro is its ability to stop autoplaying videos on all websites. Even though I've disabled autoplay in all my browsers' settings, I've noticed that many websites don't respect this preference. They use custom video players that make it hard to stop playback, and sometimes those videos start playing at full voume. StopTheMadness Pro's General tab has a feature called "Stop autoplaying audio and video," which has worked on all the websites I've visited since enabling it. For instance, I visit a website for sports scores that has a habit of embedding a live stream of its postgame analysis into other posts. This starts playing unmuted even if I'm not actively on the live blog tab. StopTheMadness Pro was able to block this, which is a big relief.

The extension can also make YouTube very usable for you. It can skip ads, show the picture-in-picture button even if you don't have YouTube Premium, set the default video quality, and automatically enable subtitles for you. Coupled with that, it can force all websites to use the native audio and video controls on your iPhone and Mac. This means that if you dislike YouTube's custom video player (or that of any other site), you can use Apple's native controls instead.

Block tracking and annoyances

Credit: Pranay Parab

On the Mac, you can use StopTheMadness Pro's keyboard shortcuts to perform useful functions such as copying a link without clicking or right-clicking it. Hover the cursor over a link and press Command-C to copy it. Check out the extension's Keyboard section to see other useful shortcuts, but that's not all. The Tab Rules section lets you decide what happens once you click a link. You can force the browser to open it in the same tab, a background tab, in a new active tab, or even open some links in the browser of your choice.

When I first bought this extension a few years ago, it was to circumvent copy-paste blocks on websites and to bypass Google's AMP pages on my iPhone. It still does those things quite well, and you can use it to reclaim the ability to right-click, copy, and paste on websites that block it. Since then, it's evolved to block many other annoyances, such as the hideous "Sign in with Google" pop-up that appears on Reddit and many other sites. It also removes tracking parameters from most links you click, and in case it can't remove them, you can go to the extension's Trackers tab and add the necessary parameters manually. StopTheMadness Pro can also automatically expand shortened URLs for you, thereby stopping link tracking via URL shorteners.

Although this extension is not an adblocker, it also allows you to hide annoyances on any webpage with its element hiding feature. Click the Hide Page Element button after opening the extension via the toolbar, and select the annoyance you wish to block. 

Advanced features worth checking out

Credit: Pranay Parab

Before getting to the advanced features, it's worth mentioning that StopTheMadness Pro supports site-specific settings, too. In its General tab on Mac, you'll see a + button next to My default options for all websites. You can click that button to add site-specific settings for the website you're on. When you're using the extension on your iPhone, this option appears in the Website section of the extension's menu. This lets you create custom preferences for websites that you frequent. 

If you're a fan of tinkering with every aspect of your web browsing experience, you can use this extension to add custom CSS or JavaScript code, replace default fonts with your own choices, or to add JavaScript snippets (as an alternative to bookmarklets). The Custom Code section lets you customize websites using CSS or JavaScript code, which will run automatically every time a page is loaded. However, the JavaScript Snippets feature in the Scripts tab is for code you'd rather run manually. 

I also like the Web Rules section of the extension, which allows me to open links from certain websites in a browser of my choice. I find that Chrome or its derivatives handle Google Docs or Sheets a lot better than Safari, and I used this to redirect all those links to a different browser. 

It's not often that one comes across a powerful browser extension that works so well. StopTheMadness Pro is exceptional and I consider it a must-have for anyone who browses the web on Apple devices. It definitely has a learning curve, but the developer's impressive documentation makes it really easy to learn more about every available feature.