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StopTheMadness for macOS Safari Support

Help Topics:

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.

Why is the icon tinted in Safari?
Safari automatically tints most extension icons when the extension is active on the current web page. The tint is your accent color from General System Preferences. The StopTheMadness icon was originally designed to avoid this distracting tint, because StopTheMadness is active on every web page. However, Apple changed Safari version 15.1 so that StopTheMadness could no longer avoid the tint. You can read more about this change in my blog post.

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 Safari window, and select the Website Options tab.

StopTheMadness Website Options Tab

Video Options:

YouTube Options:

Contextual Menu Options:
Safari contextual menu

New Tab Behavior:

(External links are cross-site, with a different domain than the current web site.)

Open Link with:

Select the alternative web browser to be used by the "Open Link with" contextual menu item, the hover shortcut ⌘-v, and the new tab behaviors "Open external links with" and "Open all links with". Select the empty top row of the popup menu to disable all of these website options. If you have Link Unshortener installed, you can set it as the alternative web browser. StopTheMadness and Link Unshortener were designed to work together.

Dangerous Options (Site Breakage):

The features labeled "Dangerous Options" 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.

When you change the website options in StopTheMadness, those changes apply immediately to the active Safari 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.

How to Add Website Options:
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".

Video Highlight:
When you press the Video Highlight button, everything on the current web page becomes hidden except videos. (If there are no videos, the page will be blank.) Pressing the button again toggles page visibility back on. Video Highlight is temporary and gets reset when you navigate to a new page in the current tab.

Video Highlight is great for accessing all of the native video controls. The website option "Show video controls" works on the majority of videos, but there are some exceptions, and in those cases Video Highlight should work. Or if you prefer, you can use Video Highlight instead of "Show video controls".

When the "Hover shortcuts" website option is enabled, the keyboard shortcut option-command-v triggers the video highlight feature.

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 CSS or JS that you enter in the Custom Elements tab applies to the current selection in the Website Options tab. Custom Elements are in a separate tab in order to provide enough space for text entry.

You can enable "Also use Default options for all websites" to make the selected website inherit any custom CSS or JS that you've defined in the Default options. This allows you to use your custom CSS or JS on every website, including websites with customized options.

Technical notes: Custom elements are loaded into all frames on the web page. The custom <script> element is created after the DOMContentLoaded event, and you can check if (window === window.top) in JavaScript for the top frame.

StopTheMadness Custom Elements Tab

Safari style sheet customization: This is a legacy feature, superseded by Custom CSS, but the feature is still available for use if desired. 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.

Font Replacements:
You can replace one font with a different font on websites by creating a font replacement rule. The replacement can be either a system font from your Mac or a web font from a URL. The font URL can be absolute (https://) or a path relative to the URL of the website. To use one of Apple's San Francisco fonts, select it under the System category in the Replacement Font popup.

One limitation is that Safari refuses to display user-installed local fonts. The only local replacement fonts allowed are system fonts. This limitation is caused by tracking prevention in WebKit. Unfortunately there's no known workaround for this limitation.

When you create a font replacement rule, StopTheMadness automatically adds the appropriate @font-face CSS rules to the page. To replace a generic font-family name, select Serif, Sans-serif, or Monospace under the Generic category in the Original Font popup. To replace the default Safari font, use Times for the Original Font Name, because Safari uses Times when no font is specified by the page.

Use the Style popup if you need fine-grained control over font replacement for particular styles such as bold or italic.

StopTheMadness Fonts Tab

You can enable "Also use Default options for all websites" to make the selected website inherit any font replacement rules that you've defined in the Default options. This allows you to use your font replacement rules on every website, including websites with customized options.

Use my Safari content blocker StopTheFonts to block web fonts entirely. When web fonts are blocked, Safari falls back to system fonts, and your replacements rules in StopTheMadness will apply in that case.

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 Redirects Tab

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:
https://www.reddit.com/
Replacement:
https://old.reddit.com/

URL matching pattern:
https://twitter.com/
Replacement:
https://nitter.net/

URL matching pattern:
/^https://en\.wikipedia\.org/([^?#]+)([^?]*)$/
Replacement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/$1?useskin=vector$2

URL matching pattern:
/^mailto:/
Replacement:
https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&to=

URL matching pattern:
/^http:/
Replacement:
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 drag and drop to change the order. You can also use the checkboxes to temporarily disable a rule.

The Redirects are checked by StopTheMadness before the Web URL Rules, so the two features can be combined to redirect a URL and then open the redirected URL in another app.

Temporarily disable the extension:
If you need to quickly disable the Safari extension temporarily, just uncheck "Extension enabled" at the top of the popup. The toolbar icon will be badged with "OFF". The extension remains disabled until you check "Extension enabled" again.

Extension disabled

Known Website Compatibility Issues:
In these cases you may want to create custom website options and disable the specific feature.

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