StopTheMadness for Safari Support
Safari 14 and Big Sur:
The current Mac App Store version of StopTheMadness is fully compatible with Safari 14 and macOS 11 Big Sur.
Apple Silicon:
The current Mac App Store version of StopTheMadness is a Universal Binary. It runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
Safari Technology Preview:
StopTheMadness is fully compatible with Safari Technology Preview. However, enabling StopTheMadness in Safari does not automatically enable it in Safari Technology Preview, so you'll need to enable StopTheMadness in Safari Technology Preview's Preferences.
Privacy:
According to Safari's Preferences, StopTheMadness "Can read sensitive information from webpages, including passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards on all webpages" and "Can see when you visit all webpages". However, this is just boilerplate text from Apple shown for every Safari extension that can modify webpages. StopTheMadness does not read, use, or share your personal data. The privacy policy has more details about StopTheMadness privacy. See also my blog post The security of Safari extensions for a more detailed explanation of StopTheMadness permissions.
Refunds:
Apple can grant refunds for App Store purchases on request. App Store developers do not have the power to grant refunds, only Apple has that power. For instructions on how to request a refund, please see Apple's support article Request a refund for an App Store or iTunes Store purchase.
Website Options:
You can selectively enable and disable StopTheMadness features. Your custom options can be configured to apply to every web page or just to web sites that you specify. To change the options, open the StopTheMadness app in the Applications folder, and select the Website Options tab.
There are a number of protection features that you can enable and disable. By default, the "Recommended" features are enabled. These provide you with a high level of protection while also maximizing website compatibility. The features labeled "Use with caution" provide even higher levels of protection, but there may be more sites that don't work right when they're enabled, which is why they're disabled by default. Any and all of the features can be enabled or disabled as necessary or desired. Below is an explanation of each feature:
- ⌘-click: When enabled, ⌘-click (and middle-click with a mouse) always opens links in a new tab. When disabled, websites can prevent you from opening links in a new tab.
- ⌘-key shortcuts: When enabled, ⌘-key shortcuts always go to Safari. When disabled, websites can hijack or disable keyboard shortcuts.
- Autocomplete: When enabled, autocompletion and AutoFill of user names, passwords, and other information always works in web forms. When disabled, websites can prevent AutoFill.
Warning: If you use a Chinese keyboard as an input source in System Preferences, it may not work right in text fields with Autocomplete enabled.
- Contextual menus: When enabled, you can always open Safari's contextual menu. When disabled, websites can prevent you from opening the contextual menu or substitute their own menu for Safari's.
- Cut, copy, and paste: When enabled, you can always cut, copy, and paste text on a web page. When disabled, websites can prevent you from doing cut, copy, and paste.
The Cut, copy, and paste feature also allows you to copy a link by hovering over it and pressing the keyboard shortcut (⌘-c) for the copy command. You may also need the ⌘-key shortcuts feature to be enabled, if the website captures keyboard shortcuts.
- Drag and drop: When enabled, you can always drag and drop on a web page. When disabled, websites can prevent you from doing drag and drop.
- Input maxlength warning: When enabled, StopTheMadness warns you if the characters you type or paste into a password field or other input field exceed the maximum length of the field. If this feature is disabled, then some of the characters you type or paste into a password field can get silently lost, with no warning.
- Privacy: When enabled, your privacy is protected on the web in a a number of ways:
- Stops hyperlink auditing by removing the anchor "ping" attribute on link clicks.
- Stops tracking beacons (
Navigator.sendBeacon) from firing.
- Prevents hijacking/rewriting of clicked links in Google Search results.
- Prevents hijacking/rewriting of clicked links in Gmail.
- Prevents hijacking/rewriting of clicked links in Facebook.
- Removes tracking tags such as
utm_source (Urchin Tracking Module), gclid (Google Click ID), and fbclid (Facebook Click ID) from the end of the URL when you click, drag, or open a contextual menu on a link.
- Tab closing and visibility: When enabled, you can always immediately close a tab. When disabled, websites can stop you from closing a tab or window. Instead, the site may show a popup alert that asks "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" when you try to close a tab or a window.
The Tab closing and visibility feature also prevents websites from observing visibilitychange events, which are part of the Page Visibility API. Using this API, websites can learn when a tab is visible on your screen and when the tab is hidden. When Tab closing and visibility is enabled, websites can't observe when you show or hide a tab or your screen.
- Text selection: When enabled, you can always select text on a web page. When disabled, websites can preventing you from selecting text.
- Force links to open in current tab: Websites frequently add
target="_blank" to a link to make the link automatically open in a new tab when you click. If you prefer to open links in the current tab instead of a new tab, you can enable this feature, which removes target="_blank" from links. When enabled, normal link clicks always open in the current tab. (You can still ⌘-click to open the link in a new tab.) When this feature is disabled, some links may automatically open in new tabs when clicked.
- Images in front: When enabled, all images on the page are forced to the front. This can help on websites such as Instagram that put a transparent overlay in front of images, which prevents you from dragging or opening the contextual menu for an image. Images in front is disabled by default, because it can mess up the page layout on some sites.
- Mouse movement: When enabled, websites cannot use JavaScript to track the movement of your mouse pointer on the web page. You may want to enable this feature to protect your privacy. It can also stop popups from appearing when hovering over links on sites such as Wikipedia and Twitter. When this feature is disabled, websites can use JavaScript to track the movement of your mouse pointer.
- Scrolling: When enabled, smooth scrolling should always work on websites. When disabled, websites can prevent or hijack scrolling. This is known as "scrolljacking". Scrolling protection is disabled by default, because it causes incompatibilities with a number of websites. See Known Issues for a few examples.
- Show video controls: When enabled, video controls are shown by default, and you can always click on a video to control it or show the contextual menu for videos. When disabled, websites can cover videos with a transparent overlay that prevents you from directly controlling the video. This feature is disabled by default, because a lot of websites have custom video controls and don't use the HTML5 default controls.
- Stop autosubmit of autofilled forms: In Safari 12.1 and later when you AutoFill a login form, Safari automatically submits the form. This can cause problems such as preventing you from checking "Remember Me", or sometimes even login failure. When you enable "Stop autosubmit of autofilled forms", Safari will no longer automatically submit login forms. Instead, StopTheMadness will display a confirmation asking whether you want to submit or cancel submission. See Stop autosubmit of autofilled forms for more details.
(Tip: When the confirmation is displayed, you can use the return key to submit or the escape key to cancel.)
- Stop video autoplay: When enabled, videos are prevented from autoplaying. This happens regardless of Safari's Auto-Play Preferences, and it works even on sites where Safari's Auto-Play Preferences don't work, such as YouTube. When disabled, websites can autoplay videos without any user interaction. This feature is disabled by default.
Warning: When "Stop video autoplay" is enabled, you may not be able to use the play/pause media function key to start playing a video in Safari, though pause will still work.
- Style sheet: When enabled, StopTheMadness adds the attribute
stopthemadness-href with the value of the URL of the page to the html element of the page. You can use this attribute to write site-specific CSS in your Safari style sheet. You can set your .css file as the style sheet in the Advanced tab of the Preferences window in Safari. (Note: If you edit your style sheet while Safari is open, you'll need to relaunch Safari for the changes to take effect.)
For more details, along with useful examples of site-specific CSS, see StopTheMadness for Safari Style sheet.
- Textarea: When enabled, multi-line text editors (HTML
textarea elements) are also protected by the website options "⌘-key shortcuts", "Cut, copy, and paste", and "Text selection". By default, only single-line editors (HTML input elements) are protected, because multi-line editors don't usually prevent copy and paste, and a lot of websites have special multi-line "rich text" editors with highly customized editing that can break with the textarea feature enabled. However, you may need to enable this feature on certain websites if they disable copy and paste.
- All key presses: When enabled, stops websites from hijacking key presses on the page. This feature cannot be enabled with the Default options for all websites, because it would cause breakages on too many sites. It usually shouldn't be necessary, but in some rare cases a website will go to extreme lengths to interfere with your typing. (Note: textareas are not covered by "All key presses" unless the "Textarea" option is also enabled.)
- All mouse clicks: When enabled, stops websites from hijacking mouse clicks on the page. This feature cannot be enabled with the Default options for all websites, because it would cause breakages on too many sites. It usually shouldn't be necessary, but in some rare cases a website will go to extreme lengths to prevent you from selecting text on the page. If the Text selection feature is not sufficient to enable text selection on a page, you may need to enable All mouse clicks too in order to select text.
- Focus and blur: A focus event occurs when a website element gets the keyboard focus, and a blur event occurs when a website element loses the keyboard focus. When enabled, the Focus and blur feature stops websites from capturing these events. This feature cannot be enabled with the Default options for all websites, because it would cause breakages on too many sites.
When you change the website options in StopTheMadness, those changes will apply the next time you load a web site in Safari. If you already have a web site open in Safari, and you want the changes to apply immediately to the web site, you need to reload the page in Safari.
How to Add Website Options:
(Watch the video tutorial on YouTube.)
The Default options for all websites apply to every web page in Safari, unless you have custom options for a particular site. To create custom options for a website, press the + button. There are two ways to specify websites: domain or URL. Examples of domains are "apple.com" and "google.com". If you specify a domain, then subdomains of that domain are automatically covered too. For example, "google.com" also covers "www.google.com", "mail.google.com", etc. If you want a subdomain to have different options than its domain, create a separate item for the subdomain. The longest match always wins, so if you have items for both "google.com" and "mail.google.com", then your "mail.google.com" options will apply when you load the page "https://mail.google.com/". If you want options to apply only to subdomains but not to the domain, put a dot at the beginning: ".google.com" applies to "https://www.google.com/", etc., but not to "https://google.com/".
You may want to apply custom options only to certain paths of a website, in which case you need to specify the website as a full URL. For example, if you enter "https://www.google.com/maps", then the custom options will only apply to Google Maps and not to Google Search at "https://www.google.com/". Subpaths are automatically covered too: "https://www.google.com/maps" would also cover "https://www.google.com/maps/search/apple+park". You can customize subpath options by creating a separate item for the subpath. As with domains, the longest match among URLs always wins. And a URL setting that includes a domain will override a domain setting for the same domain, since the URL is longer. So "https://www.google.com/maps" takes precedence over "www.google.com".
Migrate Safari Extension Settings to a New Mac:
To migrate your custom Safari extension settings to a new Mac, you can export them to a file on one Mac and then import the file on the other Mac. The Export and Import commands are in the main menu of StopTheMadness:
The exported Safari extension settings include your Website Options, URL Scheme Rules, and Web URL Rules. The Website Options from other browsers, such as Firefox and Google Chrome, are not included.
Known Website Compatibility Issues:
In these cases you may want to create custom website options and disable the specific feature.
SmugMug (smugmug.com): Disable "Drag and drop" and "Privacy" to fix reordering photos.
Scrolling: icloud.com, smartsheet.com
Show video controls: Hulu, Netflix, nfl.com
Airtable (airtable.com): Disable "⌘-key shortcuts" to fix ⌘C and ⌘V for cells.
