I’m happy to announce that I’ve completed working on Impulse Blocker Firefox extension and ready to the release the version 1.0.

Here are some of the important changes and my personal notes.

1. Ability to pause extension for brief amount of time

This feature was very critical for me. Whenever I wanted to take a break I had to turn off the extension completely. Which is of course not helpful if you are trying be productive.

With this feature you now will be able to pause the extension for a brief amount of time. The options are as seen below.

After that brief amount of time, the extension will turn itself back on. And your impulses will be blocked.

2. Removing on/off buttons from the popup

Now that we have way of pausing the extension, we don’t need those old on/off buttons anymore. You can remove them via the settings page. Now the extension popup will look like this.

3. Brand new settings page

We gotten rid of that old settings page. I have implement a design by Crote. You can see the relevant issue here.

4. Saving on/off state of the extension

And again, since we have pausing functionality now we have started to save the extension state to the local storage. So if you turn off the extension and then restart the browser, it will still be turned off.

5. Ability to work in private window

In private window the extension simply was not working. I have changed the way of communication between settings/popup pages and the background of the. So it should all work fine now.

However do note that Firefox will soon disable extensions on the private page by default.

6. Other Stuff

Behind the scenes, I made some huge changes. I re-wrote it using React for the popup and settings pages. I started to bundle it all up using Webpack so I believe code is a little bit easier to work with. The way I store the websites on the local storage is also changes. Hope that change won’t break anyones setup.

Many thanks to everyone who uses the extension. I hope it is a little bit enjoyable to use it now.