Media Battery Autor: Milo

Nobody plans to lose an hour to a feed. You open it to check one thing, and the tab is still there at midnight. The usual fix is a blocker, and the usual end of that story is turning the blocker off on day three because it got in the way of something real.

Media Battery is a battery instead of a wall. Time on the sites you pick drains it, time away refills it, and when it runs empty those sites go dark for ten minutes. Nothing is ever forbidden. It just stops being free, and the charge ticking down on the toolbar makes the spending visible while it happens instead of after. It only counts time you're actually there: background tabs, minimized windows, and muted autoplay never drain it, while a video playing with sound does.

You can cheat, but not on autopilot. Getting back in early means clearing a small task that changes on every attempt (retyping a phrase with pasting disabled, arithmetic, sorting numbers, counting letters) and writing a line on why you're back. Wrong answer, fresh set. It's a small toll, and always the same one, but that's the design: a habit can't survive having to do arithmetic first. Loosening the rules in settings takes two questions, so there's no side door either.

It comes with YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, Twitch, and LinkedIn built in, and you can add any site by domain. Hours let you shape the day: windows that block sites outright, exempt them, slow the charging, or cap the battery, and any blocked site can still be opened for five minutes through the same gate. One optional code shares a single battery across your devices, end to end encrypted, no account, and the lower charge always wins, so a second device can never refill what the first one spent.

And the honest limit: it can't stop someone who has decided to get around it. The extension can be switched off in two clicks and its saved data edited, like any extension. What it does stop is the version of you that never decided anything, the one that opens a feed out of muscle memory and looks up an hour later.