TunnelOFF von Sebastian Bernhard Jaskolka

DISCLAIMER: This is a paid extension. There is no free version. License keys are sold at tunneloff.com — more on that at the bottom.

WHAT VISUAL NOISE IS

Open any page you actually need to read. Now count what else is on it.

A header with nine menu items. A sidebar of "related" stories. Thumbnails. Share buttons. A newsletter box. A cookie banner. A chat bubble. Something autoplaying in the corner. A link in every second sentence.

Every one of those elements is asking for something. A link asks to be clicked. A button asks for a decision. A thumbnail asks to be looked at. None of them ask whether you have time for that right now.

Half of them are shouting in color. Red badge, blue button, orange banner, green "new" tag — each one a claim that THIS is the important thing. Six things claiming it at once means none of them is.

And nothing on the page settles the argument. On a well-built page, size does that job: big headline, smaller body, tiny footnotes, so your eye knows where to land. Most pages skip that. Everything is roughly the same size, and where to start is your problem now.

Look up from the page and it doesn't get quieter. Bookmarks bar. 36 open tabs. 74 icons. The URL bar. All of it sits above whatever you're reading, all day, asking for nothing in particular and a little bit of you anyway.

That's visual noise. Everything on the screen that competes with the one thing you came for — and each piece costs a small decision. Look, ignore, click, don't. You make those decisions whether you meant to or not, and they add up.

Most pages aren't built for reading. They're built for clicking. The noise isn't a design mistake. It's the point.

You can't turn the page off. But you can turn the noise off.

THE TUNNEL

Hold ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows), click and drag a rectangle over the part you want. Everything outside it goes dim and blurry. Inside: one paragraph, one column, one video. Whatever you picked.

The rest of the page can wait.

Press Esc and the page is back.

That's it. Nothing to set up, nothing to configure, no list of sites to block, no timer to maintain.

WHAT ELSE IS IN THE BOX

• Fullscreen Mode — tunnel plus fullscreen. Tabs, bookmarks bar, URL bar, all the icons: gone. The screen becomes the rectangle.
• Noise Score — every page gets a 0–100 rating for how much of it is pulling at you. It sits on the toolbar icon, so you see it before you read a word.
• Noise Markers — arrows and rings on every link, button and image that's pulling at your focus. Useful for seeing why a page feels loud.
• Moth Cursor — to warn you. You decide the threshold. When a page's Noise Score goes over it, a tired little moth replaces your cursor.

WHAT IT DOESN'T DO

It doesn't block websites. It doesn't track your time. It doesn't know what you're working on, and it doesn't want to. It won't tell you when to stop.

It puts a tunnel around the thing you chose and quiets the rest. What happens inside the tunnel is yours.

WHO IT'S FOR

People who work mostly in the browser: reading documentation, writing in a web editor, working through long articles, tickets, dashboards. If your workday happens on a screen, this is for you.

PRIVACY

Everything runs locally in your browser. No browsing data leaves your machine. The only network request TunnelOFF ever makes is the license check with Polar.sh (our payment provider) when you activate your key.

PRICE

TunnelOFF is a paid extension. There is no free version. Get a license key at tunneloff.com, paste it into the extension, done. No account to create, nothing to manage inside the browser. One key works wherever you work — home, office, uni, any browser. Activate up to four different browsers.