Blacklist

A very simple website blocker for Google Chrome, designed for personal use to help with procrastination.

When you find yourself on a site that's eating your time, click the Blacklist toolbar icon and hit Blacklist this site. From then on, navigating to that site redirects you to a block page while Blacklist is enabled.

To start visiting a blocked site again, navigate to it, and on the block page click Unlist this site. You then have to wait out a 15-second countdown (you can cancel it) before the site is unlisted and you're redirected back — just enough friction to make you think twice.

To disable Blacklist entirely, open chrome://extensions and toggle it off.

2026 rewrite

This was originally written in 2012 against Manifest V2. It has been rewritten for modern Chrome:

• Manifest V3 — service worker instead of a persistent background page, action instead of browser_action.
• declarativeNetRequest dynamic redirect rules instead of the removed blocking webRequest API.
• TypeScript throughout, bundled with esbuild.
• No jQuery, no Bootstrap — vanilla DOM and modern CSS (incl. dark mode).

Project layout

src/
  manifest.json          MV3 manifest
  service-worker.ts       owns the declarativeNetRequest rules
  lib/blocklist.ts        storage + DNR rule sync (shared)
  lib/messages.ts         typed messaging helpers
  popup/                  toolbar popup (html/css/ts)
  blocked/                block page with unlist countdown (html/css/ts)
icons/                    extension icons
build.mjs                 esbuild build script

Development

npm install
npm run build      # one-off build into build/
npm run watch      # rebuild on change
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit

Then load the unpacked extension:

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode
3. Click Load unpacked and select the build/ directory

To package for the Chrome Web Store, zip the contents of build/.

License

MIT — see the LICENSE file.