TimeRetriever

Hides short video and algorithmic feeds on social networks.

Save your time. You did not open YouTube to watch Shorts. You opened it for one video, and forty minutes later you are somewhere else entirely. Timeback takes out the parts of a site that are built to make that happen: the short video shelves, the algorithmic feeds, the endless suggestions. What is left is the site you actually meant to use. Everything is a switch, and everything starts on. Install it and the noise is already gone. The only switch that starts off is the one that hides a site completely, because nobody should install an extension and find YouTube blank. WHAT IT HIDES YouTube: the Shorts shelf on home and in search, the Shorts entry in the sidebar, the Shorts tab on channel pages. Also the recommendation sidebar, the end screen grid, and comments. Opening a /shorts link sends you to the normal player for that same video, at the same second, so a link someone sent you still works without the vertical feed waiting underneath it. Instagram: the Reels and Explore entries in the navigation, suggested posts in the feed, the suggested accounts module. X (Twitter): the For You tab, Trending, Who to follow, Grok. LinkedIn: the video carousel, the feed sort control, the news module. The entire feed too, as a separate switch. Reddit: the video player. The home feed, and Popular and All, as separate switches. ADD YOUR OWN SITES Five sites come built in. Any other site is yours to add. Type the address in the panel, your browser asks whether to allow that one site, and it joins the list with the same calendar, the same pause, and the same counter as the rest. This is for the site you keep opening without deciding to. A chess site, a news site, a shop, a forum. Timeback does not guess which one that is, and it never touches a site you did not add yourself. On a site you add, Timeback hides the whole thing rather than parts of it. The element by element switches are for the five above. You can add up to five of your own, remove any of them later, and taking a site off the list hands the permission back to your browser. THE WHOLE SITE, WHEN YOU WANT IT Every site has one switch that hides all of it. It starts off, it sits last in the list, and it carries a warning mark that stays visible even when the site's section is folded shut, so you always know which sites are hidden completely. Turn it on and the site is replaced by a dark screen that names it, tells you how long you have spent on sites like it this week, and says when it comes back. Video and audio stop, so nothing keeps playing behind a screen you cannot see. Turning it back off asks how long you want it off for, and it turns itself on again when that time is up. You do not have to remember. WHEN IT HIDES Every switch can run on hours, including the whole site one. Open the calendar next to a site, a group, or a single element, pick the days and the times, and it hides only inside them. No hours set means hidden all the time, which is where it starts. So "no LinkedIn between nine and six" is one switch and one calendar. BLACK AND WHITE One button turns a whole site grayscale. Thumbnails stop competing for your attention while everything else stays exactly where it was. HOW LONG YOU SPENT Next to each site, the time you spent there this week. The week starts on Monday. It is a number in the panel, not a dashboard, and it never leaves your computer. Reset to defaults erases it. A PROBLEM BEFORE TURNING THINGS OFF Optional: ask for a small arithmetic problem before anything that reduces hiding. Whoever really wants it off solves it in fifteen seconds. The impulse click does not. Turning hiding back ON never asks anything. HOW IT WORKS Timeback hides elements with CSS, in your browser, on pages your browser already loaded. The rules are applied before the first paint, so hidden sections do not flash on screen and then disappear. There is no server. The extension ships with every rule it uses. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It does not block ads. Not now, not later. It does not touch your account. It never follows, unfollows, likes, posts, votes or comments for you. It does not collect data. No browsing history, no page content, no identifiers. The only thing it remembers about a site you add is the address you typed. Nothing leaves your computer. Your settings are stored by the browser and, if you are signed in to it, synced by the browser itself. It does not send the time counter anywhere. The weekly totals stay in your browser's own storage, on this computer, and there is no server to send them to. It does not read or change anything on a site you did not add yourself. The five above come built in. Every other site takes a permission prompt from your browser, one site at a time, and you can take that permission back whenever you want. OPEN ABOUT LIMITS Websites change their markup without warning, and when they do, a hidden section can come back. An automated check runs every six hours against the live sites, so breakage is found in hours instead of weeks. If something stops working, the Support link is the fastest way to get it fixed.