Doomless: Limits for Shorts & Reels

Doomless is my Chrome extension for setting limits on short-video feeds while keeping the rest of each website available.

Opening a website for a useful video can turn into a long session in its vertical feed. Blocking the entire website also removes search, subscriptions, regular videos and messages. Doomless gives the short-video feed its own limits.

I created Doomless independently, handling product design, extension development and testing through publication on the Chrome Web Store. I designed the popup and in-page controls, built the feed engine and site adapters, and wrote the unit and browser tests. I also produced the product video, including its animation and music.

The popup brings video quotas, session timers and a daily time budget together. A small on-page counter shows what remains. When a limit is reached, Doomless pauses playback, blocks navigation to the next clip and places a curtain over the player. The surrounding website remains available.

Extra videos or minutes can require a 4-7-8 breathing exercise or a phrase typed by hand. Pasting is disabled. Extra access can also be switched off. These controls make continuing a deliberate action after the limit, with separate bonuses for video quotas and time budgets.

Session timers put a break between scrolling sessions; the daily budget resets at midnight. Hardcore adds a one-minute delay before a protection is weakened. Stricter settings take effect immediately.

I built Doomless as a Chrome Manifest V3 extension. A background service worker owns counters and session state. Content scripts detect short-video feeds, track active videos and apply the limits. I separated the policy module from the site adapters so that limit decisions and platform-specific selectors could be maintained independently.

For the popup, I used Preact through preact/compat, with Astryx components and StyleX. Shared design tokens keep it consistent with the shadow-DOM overlays. I configured Vite to build the popup, content script and background worker as separate bundles. Settings use chrome.storage.sync, and counters use chrome.storage.local.

Doomless is a published Chrome extension with a working quota-to-curtain flow on YouTube Shorts. Browser checks also covered saved settings, keyboard locking, accessibility isolation of the covered player, and protection against weakening limits. The repository includes unit and browser tests for the policy, engine and popup.

The product includes adapters for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, Facebook Reels and VK Clips. Live verification for this case study focused on YouTube; it does not establish current compatibility with every platform.