1 review
- Rated 5 out of 5by skidoo, 6 years agoOkay, so i was doubtful considering the small amount of users and even less reviews, but it works just as advertised! I wanted to cut down my fb and ig 'addictions', aka get my productivity back on track.
JUST A NOTE:
There's no way to see the maximum allowed browsing time for each 'restricted' website. For instance, i wanted to set Facebook to 5 minutes a day, and YouTube to 20 minutes. When i click on each listed website it still shows "00:00:00 / 00:15:00" for all of them. On that note the timing input field could be better, in its current form it doesn't force you to any specific input format (you can even enter "abc" if you want to), so something like a scrolling UI for |hours|minutes|seconds| a-la iPhone, or a droplist would be more intuitive and reduce possible input errors.
Anyway, so i enter "www.facebook.com" in the URL field, "00:05:00" in the grayed time field for 5 mins of daily facebook, then click "+". At that point i assume it's all good. Then i go on my Facebook tab and see that the add-on counter has started (after a few seconds i started scrolling down my fb news-feed). So i spend some time on my fb, but i look at my watch and realize it's been more than 5 minutes, so i checked the add-on and noticed the counter was indeed already at 00:11:35, it had passed the 5 minute mark i had set it up to stop at. So I guess the add-on didn't remember my original input.
Is this Add-On perfect? No, not yet. it may require a little more work... but damn IT IS ALREADY AWESOME AS IT IS!!!
By the way, after the counter went up to "00:15:00" my Facebook tab got suddenly 'emptied', literally turned into a blank page. So i closed the tab and tested if the add-on truly worked. i launch Facebook again in a new tab and IT WORKED!!! Not immediately, it takes maybe 4-5 seconds for the add-on to track you've opened one of the listed 'restricted' sites, and for which your daily browsing time has already expired, but it eventually does and boom, the tab gets 'emptied' again. And again. AND AGAIN. i've tried and it worked every single time!
Truly satisfactory to have this add-on work as advertised. Until now i was doing it the old fashion way by adding "127.0.0.1 facebook.com" in my hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc). While doing so works, it's very extreme as it won't let you access the restricted websites AT ALL. They're literally blacklisted, can't be opened on any browser. When trying to curb your social network addiction, you wanna do that gradually and MINBLOCKER offers you exactly that support, a way to improve your productivity. DRASTICALLY! Got more done this weekend than this entire past month. Social networks are more than time consuming, they're a cancer, and most people don't realize they've fallen into the depth of a true addiction.
But when you realize like me, that you've spent 9 hours this week on youtube and 5 hours on Facebook, trust me, this add-on is a godsend. Thank you CK for this great add-on, i hope you will continue to improve it, in particular allow a simple way to set/check max browsing times individually for each restricted website listed on the add-on.
Thanks again!!!Developer response
posted 5 years agoNot sure if you're still using the extension, but I really appreciate the feedback!
The time limit input field previously only accepted seconds, so when you entered 00:15:00 it was completely ignored. I've just pushed an update so this field should now be much more comprehensive (and it shouldn't accept "abc" anymore). I'm glad you pointed this out!
As for individual time limits, I now plan on adding that once I can get to it. The top time limit input field is, and will remain, a global time limit; but I think the list of sites will eventually have individual limits.
Again, thanks for the input and I'm glad you liked the tool!