Time Gatherer - Better Browsing Habits by Tomas T

Time Gatherer — Better Browsing Habits

This extension was created with the use of AI.

Set a daily time budget on the sites that eat your attention, and Time Gatherer locks them out once you've used it up. Time only counts down while the limited site is the tab you're actively viewing — switching tabs, switching windows, or stepping away pauses the clock, and a background tab doesn't burn budget.

What it does

Daily budget per site: Pick a tab, choose 0 to 120 minutes, and lock it in. Once the budget runs out, the site locks in every tab it's open in, including new ones opened afterward, until the next daily reset (shown in local time). A limit can't be raised, reset, or deleted once any time has been spent on it — it stays locked in until reset. Subdomains are covered automatically under the parent domain's limit.

Categories: Group related sites (e.g. X, Instagram, Reddit, Bluesky under "Social") under one shared budget, up to 4 hours. Any site in the group draining the clock locks the whole group together. A site can only belong to one category and can't have both a category membership and an individual limit at the same time. Categories can be renamed or re-iconed anytime, unlike budgets themselves.

Usage tracking: Every visited site gets an automatic daily tally of foreground time and visit count, even without a limit set. No extra locking or popups tied to this, just visible numbers.

Reclaimed time and streaks: Unspent budget (site untouched, or session ended early) is tallied as "reclaimed time," shown on a rolling 7-day chart. A streak counter tracks consecutive days without walking back a limit, shown on the lock screen.

Tab manager: Search/filter tabs across windows, bulk close/suspend/move to new window, sort a window's tabs by site, close duplicates, reopen last closed tab or window, and convert a tab selection into a new category.

Light and dark theme toggle, no "follow system" option.

Privacy

No network requests at all — everything is bundled locally, nothing leaves the device. Budgets, categories, usage history, and settings are stored only in Firefox's local extension storage. No host permissions — the extension only reads tab URLs, not page content. No telemetry, analytics, remote config, or third-party code. The lock screen shows only the bare blocked domain, not the full URL, so nothing gets written to browsing history. Per-site usage tallies hold only today's numbers; older days aren't kept. The one exception is the 7-day reclaimed-time total, stored as an aggregate only, never per-site, never older than a week.

Good to know

This is a friction tool for habit-building, not parental-control software. It won't run in Private Browsing unless enabled manually in about:addons. Disabling the extension or switching Firefox profiles bypasses it, since no extension can prevent that. Because reset happens at a fixed time daily rather than a rolling 24 hours, locking a site late in the day results in a shorter lock than locking it early — this is intended behavior, not a bug.

Permissions

tabs — reads tab URLs/titles to enforce limits and run the tab manager
storage — saves budgets, categories, settings locally
alarms — keeps the countdown accurate when the background page is idle
sessions — restores the last closed tab or window

No host permissions are ever requested; enforcement works by watching tab navigation, not by inspecting page content.

Requires Firefox 128+ (ESR-compatible), Manifest V3.