Website Protections:
You can selectively enable and disable StopTheMadness protection features. Your custom protections can be configured to apply to every web page or just to web sites that you specify. To change your protections, open the StopTheMadness app in the Applications folder.
There are a number of protection features that you can enable and disable. By default, the "Recommended Protections" are enabled. These provide you with a high level of protection while also maximizing website compatibility. The protections 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 website protections can be enabled or disabled as necessary or desired. Below is an explanation of each website protection:
- ⌘-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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Removes tracking tags such as
utm_source(Urchin Tracking Module),gclid(Google Click ID), andfbclid(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 protection also prevents websites from observingvisibilitychangeevents, 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.
- 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.) - 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 protection, which removestarget="_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 protection is disabled, some links may automatically open in new tabs when clicked. - 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.
- 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 protection 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. - 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 protection is disabled by default, because a lot of websites have custom video controls and don't use the HTML5 default controls.
- All Mouse Clicks: When enabled, stops websites from hijacking mouse clicks on the page. This protection cannot be enabled with the Default Website Protections, 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 website protection 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: An experimental feature, disabled by default. It has compatibility issues on a number of sites and should only be enabled if suggested when you contact support. 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. Enabling the Focus and Blur protection prevents websites from capturing these events. This protection cannot be enabled with the Default Website Protections, because it would cause breakages on too many sites.
When you change the protections 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.
