Base Break

A less overbearing site blocker, that helps you make more mindful decisions.

Instead of fully blocking certain sites, it makes you type in a long base64 string before opening the site, encouraging you to reconsider and think about what choice you want to make.

It short-circuits the instant gratification part of your brain, and gives your rational prefrontal cortex time to make a smarter decision, while still leaving the ultimate choice in your hands.

Installation

Load the extension

Build both browser versions:

npm run build

Chrome extension files are written to dist/chrome; Firefox is written to dist/firefox.

Load in Chrome

1. Open chrome://extensions.
2. Enable Developer mode.
3. Select Load unpacked.
4. Choose dist/chrome.

Load in Firefox

1. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox.
2. Select Load Temporary Add-on.
3. Choose dist/firefox/manifest.json.

Configuration

Set filtered sites

Open the extension options or popup and add filtered sites one at a time:

example.com
news.example.com
https://example.com/work

Each filtered site has its own difficulty slider. Domains match subdomains. URL paths match by prefix.

The difficulty slider controls how many random bytes are used to generate that site's base64 challenge. More bytes produce a longer string.

Delay mode

Adds further friction by forcing the user to wait for a random period of time between keypresses.

In the settings page, this feature can be enabled/disabled and the min/max interval can be set.