This App Eliminates Auto-Playing Videos, Trackers, and Other Inconveniences of Modern Viewing.
The modern Internet is full of annoyances designed to degrade your experience. Sites disable copying, right-click, and shove all sorts of massive banners and auto-playing videos in your face, even if they hide the content you’re here for. If you’re worried about this sort of thing and you’re browsing the site on your iPhone or Mac, there’s a solution: the StopTheMadness Pro app ($15). It works with Safari on your iPhone or Mac, as well as Firefox and Chrome for Mac.
StopTheMadness Pro is a universal solution for Internet recovery. 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 mostly use them with Safari on Mac). If my summary isn’t enough for you, after installing the extension, you can also click its icon in the toolbar to see everything it can do. It can be a little overwhelming since there are over 50 features listed on the General tab itself, but the extension provides a nice set of default settings to help you get started. If you don’t have time to test every feature right away, the default settings and my recommendations will still save you a lot of trouble.
However, once you’re ready to experiment further, you can head over to the StopTheMadness Pro website to learn more about each feature. Please note that in Chrome and Firefox the app uses a non-standard installation method, but you can easily follow the in-app instructions to install and update the extension if necessary.
Take back control of your online video
My favorite feature in StopTheMadness Pro is the ability to stop videos from auto-playing on all websites. Even though I have disabled autoplay in all my browser settings, I have noticed that many websites do not honor this preference. They use special video players that make it difficult to stop playing and sometimes these videos start playing at full volume. StopTheMadness Pro’s General tab has a “Stop Audio and Video Autoplay” feature that has worked on every website I’ve visited since enabling it. For example, I visit a sports results website that has a habit of embedding live coverage of its post-match analysis into other publications. This starts playing without sound even if I’m not actively in the live blog tab. StopTheMadness Pro was able to block this, which is a big relief.
The extension can also make YouTube very convenient for you. It can skip ads, show a picture-in-picture button even if you don’t have YouTube Premium, set video quality to default, and automatically turn on subtitles. Combined with this, it can force all websites to use the built-in audio and video controls on your iPhone and Mac. This means that if you don’t like YouTube’s (or any other site’s) native video player, you can use Apple’s built-in controls instead.
Block tracking and annoyance
On Mac, you can use StopTheMadness Pro keyboard shortcuts to perform useful functions such as copying a link without right-clicking. Hover over the link and press Command-C to copy it. Visit the Keyboard section of the extension to see other useful keyboard shortcuts, but that’s not all. The Tab Rules section allows you to decide what happens after a link is clicked. You can force the browser to open it in the same tab, in 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 several years ago, it was intended to bypass copy and paste blocks on websites and to bypass Google AMP pages on my iPhone. It still does a good job of these tasks, and you can use it to regain your ability to right-click, copy, and paste on websites that block it. It’s since been improved and now blocks a lot of other nuisances, like the nasty “Sign in with Google” pop-up that appears on Reddit and many other sites. It also removes tracking options from most links you click, and if you can’t remove them, you can go to the extension’s Trackers tab and add the options you want manually. StopTheMadness Pro can also automatically expand shortened URLs, thereby stopping link tracking through URL shorteners.
Although this extension is not an ad blocker, it also allows you to hide nuisances on any web page with its hide elements feature. Click the “Hide Page Element” button after opening the extension via the toolbar and select the annoyance you want to block.
Advanced Features Worth Checking Out
Before moving on to the advanced features, it’s worth noting that StopTheMadness Pro also supports site-specific settings. In the General tab on your Mac, you’ll see a “+” button next to My default settings for all websites . You can click this button to add settings specific to the website you are on. When you use the extension on your iPhone, this option appears in the Website section of the extension’s menu. This allows you to create custom settings for the websites you visit frequently.
If you like to experiment with all aspects of web browsing, you can use this extension to add your own CSS or JavaScript code, replace default fonts with your own, or add JavaScript snippets (as an alternative to bookmarklets). The Custom Code section allows you to customize websites with CSS or JavaScript code that will run automatically every time the page is loaded. However, the JavaScript Snippets feature in the Scripts tab is for code that you prefer to run manually.
I also like the Web Rules section of the extension, which allows me to open links from specific websites in the browser of my choice. I find Chrome or its derivatives to handle Google Docs or Sheets much better than Safari, and I used that to redirect all those links to a different browser.
It’s not often that you come across a powerful browser extension that works this well. StopTheMadness Pro is an exceptional product and I consider it a must have for anyone who browses the internet on Apple devices. It definitely has a learning curve, but the impressive developer documentation makes it easy to learn more about each feature available.