Support Home: StopTheMadness Support
Help Topics:
Privacy:
According to Brave, StopTheMadness has permissions to "Read and change all your data on websites you visit". However, this is just boilerplate text from Brave shown for every extension that can modify webpages. StopTheMadness does not read, change, or share your personal data. The privacy policy has more details about StopTheMadness privacy.
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 popup in the toolbar of a Brave window. You can also open the Extensions window in Brave, click the Details button under StopTheMadness, and then click "Extension options" on the Details page.
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. The features labeled "Widespread breakage" are intended to be used sparingly, only on specific sites where you know you need them, because otherwise they can cause a large number of incompatibilities on other sites. Any and all of the features can be enabled or disabled as necessary or desired. Below is an explanation of each feature:
Recommended:
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.Navigator.sendBeacon
) from firing.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.Use with caution:
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.Widespread breakage:
textarea
elements) are also protected by the website options "Protect ⌘-key shortcuts", "Protect copy, cut, and paste", and "Protect 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 Protect textarea feature enabled. However, you may need to enable this feature on certain websites if they disable copy and paste.Custom <style>
element and Custom <script>
element:
If you enter text into this area, StopTheMadness will create a custom HTML <style>
or <script>
element on the web page. The text you enter will become the element's inline CSS or JavaScript. If the text area is empty, then no custom element is created on the web page. StopTheMadness doesn't check your syntax, so you'll probably want to copy the CSS and JS from elsewhere and paste it into StopTheMadness, for example from userscript sites such as Greasy Fork. (The custom <script>
element is created after the DOMContentLoaded
event.)
When you change the website options in StopTheMadness, those changes apply immediately to the active Brave tab, and will apply to all web pages loaded thereafter in any tab. If you already had a web page open in a background tab before you changed the website options, and you want the changes to apply immediately to that web page, you need to switch to the tab and reload the page.
Redirects:
StopTheMadness can automatically redirect URLs so that when you open a link to one web site, your web browser loads a different site of your choosing. For example, you can redirect new Reddit to old Reddit if you prefer the old user interface. Or you can use privacy-preserving alternatives to popular web sites such as Nitter for Twitter and Invidious for YouTube.
StopTheMadness uses the JavaScript function String.replace()
to redirect URLs. To create a redirect, you need a URL matching pattern and a replacement for that pattern. The matching pattern can be either a substring of the URL or a regex expression enclosed in "/" characters. The replacement is always a substring, though there are some special characters you can use in the replacement, as explained by the String.replace()
documentation. Examples:
URL matching pattern | Replacement |
---|---|
https://www.reddit.com/ |
https://old.reddit.com/ |
https://youtube.com/ |
https://invidious-us.kavin.rocks/ |
https://twitter.com/ |
https://nitter.net/ |
https://mobile.twitter.com/ |
https://nitter.net/ |
/^https?://(mobile\.)?twitter.com// |
https://nitter.net/ |
/^mailto:/ |
https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&to= |
/^http:/ |
https: |
The redirect rules are matched in the order they appear in StopTheMadness, though the order usually shouldn't matter if the rules are for different domains. If needed, you can use the up arrow buttons to change the order. You can also use the checkboxes to temporarily disable a rule.
How to Add Website Options:
The Default options for all websites apply to every web page in Brave, unless you have custom options for a particular site. To create custom options for a website, press the New Customized Website 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
".
Known Website Compatibility Issues:
In these cases you may want to create custom website options and disable the specific feature.
Protect scrolling: apple.com
, icloud.com
, cnn.com
, netflix.com
, smartsheet.com
, twitter.com
Show native video controls: hulu.com
, netflix.com
, nfl.com
Stop autoplaying videos: paramountplus.com
Support Home: StopTheMadness Support