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Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

getintention.com

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Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

#21

Post by phalangion »

namuorg wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I've been working on a Chrome/Firefox extension called Intention to help me stay focused and not get distracted, and for me and my friends, we've found it more effective than other tools we've tried. The idea behind it is extremely simple: Commit to a time limit before using a distracting site. This prevents the two most common ways that we get sucked into distractions online: 1. Habitual navigation: Througho…

This is great. I think it'll fit better with the way I want to control my impulse browsing than others I've tried (StayFocused and manually editing /etc/hosts are the other mains ways I've tried). Thank you!

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

#23

Post by namuorg »

m_a_g wrote: post #16

You should look into Motion. https://www.inmotion.app/ It is very similar to your product.

Yup, I'm a fan of Motion, and I'm glad they're also trying to help people spend time well! It's a big problem to tackle, and given that we're up against multi-billion dollar corporations, we can use all the help we can get. Motion inspired parts of Intention's design (e.g. the default unlock duration in Intention used to be 5 minutes, but I liked how Motion defaulted to 1 minute so I changed it).

Some key differences between Intention and Motion:

Product

- Intention lets you set a daily limit so that you're encouraged to limit your distracted browsing.

- To calculate remaining time, Intention uses active time (time actually spent on a site), not clock time (time passed since you unlocked a site).

- Intention displays its timer in the browser toolbar instead of directly on the page, which can block UI elements

Privacy

- Intention only requests access to the sites you select, not all sites.

- Intention gives users full control over what data they share. Right now, Intention includes only crash reporting (no analytics or tracking), and you can disable even that inside the settings.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

#26

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

namuorg wrote: post #23
m_a_g wrote: post #16

You should look into Motion. https://www.inmotion.app/ It is very similar to your product.

Yup, I'm a fan of Motion, and I'm glad they're also trying to help people spend time well! It's a big problem to tackle, and given that we're up against multi-billion dollar corporations, we can use all the help we can get. Motion inspired parts of Intention's design (e.g. the default unlock duration in Intention used to be 5 minutes, but I liked how Motion defaulted to 1 minute so I changed it). Some key differences…

Thank you very much! The privacy aspect was key for me, thanks for doing this right.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

#29

Post by j88439h84 »

Hey this looks really helpful! I appreciate your commitment to privacy, that's a very important feature for me. Nonetheless, having been burned by Chrome extensions in the past [1], I'm worried about privacy and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to make it open source to allay those concerns.

[1] https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio...

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing

#30

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

Love the idea and the execution looks great too!

I'm the kind of person who will just keep selecting to view a bit longer so it wouldn't work for me (I need more rigid restrictions on things like Freedom and actual physical locks) but I'm super happy to see new approaches to this kind of thing emerge.

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