On April 30, 2018, I released version 1.0 of my web browser extension StopTheMadness. For nostalgia, I'll link to the original announcement. Five years later it's still going strong, stronger than ever, and in celebration I'm holding a sale! To mark the 5th anniversary, both StopTheMadness Mac and StopTheMadness Mobile are now only $5. Or more precisely, they're $4.99, the original price of StopTheMadness 5 years ago. (The new App Store pricing options allowing zeros at the end don't take effect until May 9, too late for my anniversary.) Since April 30 falls on Sunday this year, I decided to announce the sale today, Friday, and extend it over the entire long weekend, through Monday!
Looking back, it's amazing how much StopTheMadness has changed, improved, expanded. Version 1.0 only handled form autocomplete, text selection, cut, copy, paste, drag, drop, and contextual menus. In contrast, here's the latest version for Safari Mac (click to enlarge image).
Talk about feature bloat!
Let me give a brief timeline of some notable feature additions to StopTheMadness over the past 5 years:
January 2019: Firefox extension
May 2019: Show native video controls
December 2019: Stop autoplaying videos
February 2020: Chrome extension
September 2021: iOS extension (including AMP and "get the app" blocking)
December 2021: Site-specific CSS and JS
May 2022: Custom URL redirects
November 2022: Font replacements
April 2023 (last week): Edit tab URL in Mobile Safari
StopTheMadness has been called the "Swiss Army knife" of extensions. With so many features, some of its individual features tend to get overlooked. I'm trying to do a better job of communicating about StopTheMadness, for example with this blog, and also with the release notes now shown on every extension update.
I'd like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to thank those who made the last 5 years of StopTheMadness possible. Thank you to all of my customers for allowing me to achieve the dream of becoming an indie developer. You've supported me not only with your purchases but also with your feature requests, bug reports, and word of mouth recommendations. Please keep them coming! Thank you to the Apple news media for your generous coverage and your glowing reviews. I've listed some praise on my front page. Thank you to Mac App Store editorial, who have been good to me and featured my extensions a number of times. Thank you to the Apple Safari team for supporting Safari extensions, especially for adding extensions to iOS! Thank you to my fellow software developers on social media, who respond to my development questions and tolerate my kvetching.
My work on StopTheMadness is never done, nor would I want it to be done, because I'd get bored without it. I look forward to the next 5 years, and to the 10th anniversary. I hope this lasts forever, and I don't have to get another job again. In fact, I'm not sure I can get another job again, so indie dev had better work out. Apropos of this thought, StopTheMadness is on sale now in the Mac App Store and iOS App Store. Happy anniversary, to me and to you!