Smoove Operator Autor: Smooth Operator

Once upon a browser, a White Rabbit ran past me holding a pocket watch and a dial up modem. "Can't stop," he said. "I've got a date with the 1997 web, and nobody there is going to ask me to subscribe."

I followed him down the hole.

I fell past a thousand pop ups, a Back button that went nowhere, and a whole Queen's court of banners yelling "Off with their clicks!" At the bottom was the old web. A Mad Hatter's tea party of guestbooks and hit counters. A March Hare running his homepage off a free host. A Cheshire Cat who grinned and disappeared instead of asking for notification permission. Some corners belonged to one queen and her walled garden. The rest was the open frontier, where anybody could hang up a shingle and nobody was trying to steal your tab.

Smoove Operator brings a little of that world back.

It stops sneaky redirects, pop ups and hidden links from dragging you somewhere you never chose. It tidies the "turn off your ad blocker" walls and subscribe or else overlays, and gives you an Undo button if it gets one wrong. It defuses "Are you sure you want to leave?" traps, Back button traps and endless alert loops. It keeps pages from quietly swapping what's on your clipboard, and it stops websites from launching apps unless you say so. It strips tracking tags like utm, fbclid and gclid off links. It also puts idle tabs to sleep and clears the cache on a schedule so Firefox stays quick.

It works on desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android. It collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere. Everything happens on your own device.

Follow the Rabbit. Mind the Queen
or
Off with Her Head for that matter.