Jeff Johnson:

My Safari extension StopTheMadness Pro has a feature to protect private windows. In other words, StopTheMadness Pro stops websites from detecting private windows in Safari. I won’t explain how my feature works, but in this blog post I’ll explain how websites detect private windows.

Jeff Johnson:

I’m sorry to say that at this time I don’t plan to make any additions or enhancements to YouTube-specific features in StopTheMadness Pro.

[…]

The downsides of adding YouTube-specific features to StopTheMadness have outweighed the upsides. YouTube is an endless time sink. Even though StopTheMadness is not a YouTube-specific extension, I’ve spent more time working on YouTube than on every other website in the world combined. Seriously. And YouTube doesn’t remain static; Google continues to change YouTube, sometimes breaking my features, requiring even more work.

I generally use Downie for YouTube videos, and it requires an insane number of updates to keep working.

Jeff Johnson:

Although DuckDuckGo doesn’t allow you to specify the number of results per page, it does have a setting to enable infinite scroll, which is more convenient than Google’s strict division of results into pages of 10 links. The problem is that I prefer to use private windows for the majority of my web browsing, especially searches, which means that any settings would disappear when the window is closed. DuckDuckGo claims to support URL parameters for settings, but in my testing, the parameters don’t actually seem to work reliably.

As you might expect, my solution to the problem is my web browser extension StopTheMadness Pro.

Jeff Johnson:

This update brings a great new feature: autoclick buttons! Specify a button on a website to be clicked automatically. For example, agree to terms and conditions, reject cookies, or close a popup.

I’ll have to report back on how well this works across various sites, but it sounds great and was successful in my initial testing:

In selection mode, manually click the button that you want to be automatically clicked.

[…]

StopTheMadness Pro uses CSS selectors to autoclick buttons. In order to click a single, specific button, and not mistakenly click the wrong buttons, StopTheMadness Pro searches for a unique way to identify the button on the page. If a unique identifier cannot be found, then the autoclick feature can’t be used with the button.

By default, StopTheMadness Pro attempts to find the button on the web page for 10 seconds after the page loads, and then it stops looking.

Previously:

• Europe Scaling Back GDPR and AI Laws
• StopTheMadness for Safari Web Apps?
• How to Highlight Text Fragments When Linking
• StopTheMadness Pro 9
• Disabled Safari Extensions Are Not Fully Disabled

Downie DuckDuckGo Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Privacy Safari Extensions StopTheMadness Web YouTube

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