Feed Free - Unbiased Feed (FF - UF)

🚀 WHAT'S NEW (Full Changes from v1.1.0 to v1.2.1)

📺 YOUTUBE UPDATES • New — Hide Entire Sidebar: Completely hide the sidebar on the video watch page, automatically auto-stretching the player container symmetrically. • New — Hide Shorts Everywhere: Fully remove the Shorts tab and video thumbnails from creator channel pages (automatically locks the parent "Hide Shorts" toggle). • New — Hide End Screens: Removes video card overlays, autoplay suggestions, and end videowalls using a recursive shadow root observer for strict style preservation across video load resets. • New — Advanced Guide Clean-up: Added toggles to selectively hide Subscriptions, Explore/Trending, Report History, and the "More from YouTube" category sections from the guide menu. • Fix — End-Screens Toggle: Fixed a bug where end screen suggestion elements remained hidden after toggling the option off; styles now reset cleanly. • Fix — Report History Line: Resolved an issue where hiding "Report history" left an extra visual separator line above the guide footer. • Fix — Profile & Playlist Grids: Scoped homepage blocking rules strictly to root home paths, resolving bugs where channel video grids or Shorts inside playlists were accidentally hidden. • Optimization — Music Visualizer Sync: Wave-bar animation now automatically halts when the active video element is paused or ended.

📸 INSTAGRAM UPDATES • New — Hide Professional Dashboard: Remove the "Professional Dashboard" link and icon from the sidebar navigation on creator/business accounts. • New — Hide Stories Everywhere: Go nuclear with stories by completely hiding the stories tray, user highlights, and timeline story rings globally (plus auto-redirecting away from /stories/). • New — Hide Stories (Home): Option to strip out the top stories tray strictly from the home timeline feed. • New — Unified Comments Hiding: Hide comment counts, comment icons, comment lines, and text areas globally while beautifully preserving the post author's original caption. • New — Dynamic Comments Restoration: Hidden comments are now dynamically tagged on-page with custom attributes, enabling instant un-hiding and restoration the moment you disable the feature without requiring a page reload. • New — Square Profile Photos: Force profile pictures, avatars, highlights, and story tray borders to render as soft, clean squares cleanly scoped to prevent structural distortion. • New — Hide Notes & Notifications: Erase status note bubbles from profiles and inbox lists, and clear out the notifications activity tab from the sidebar navigation. • New — Hide Likes: Selectively target and hide likes counts on timeline posts, reels, hover cards, and profile follower counts. • Fix — Profile & Navigation Integrity: Scoped main feed filters to protect the visibility of your personal "Saved" posts section, and re-engineered Reels hiding to shield profile grid pages so profile assets remain completely intact.

⚙️ GLOBAL & SYSTEM IMPROVEMENTS • Global Grayscale Mode: Drop a dynamic, high-contrast black & white filter over both platforms to crush visual color hooks without shifting page layouts. • Core Engine Optimization: Upgraded the synchronous Anti-Flicker scripts at document_start to guarantee instant, zero-delay node filtering during Single-Page Application (SPA) client-side routing transitions. • Enhanced Support Hub: Added prefilled support mailto actions directly inside the popup layout, alongside a clickable privacy status shield acting as a shortcut link to verify the public source code repository.

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Take control of your social media experience and break the dopamine loops.

Feed Free — Unbiased Feed (FF–UF) is a lightweight, privacy-focused digital detox browser extension designed to completely eliminate addictive algorithmic timelines, shorts, reels, and manipulative recommendations on YouTube and Instagram. Reclaim your focus, protect your mental space, and browse entirely on your own terms without getting sucked into endless scrolling.

Unlike basic blockers that break when platforms update, Feed Free targets stable semantic structures, accessibility roles, and native URL paths to ensure uninterrupted focus through client-side single-page application (SPA) navigations—no page reloads required.

🚀 OUR 3-PHASE ROADMAP

The extension is architected as an ongoing, deliberate development framework across three distinct operational milestones:

• Phase 1: Feed Free (Current Phase) — Take back absolute control over your feed layouts. Block recommendations, feeds, likes, comments, and visual triggers on YouTube and Instagram to clear out distracting dopamine loops entirely. • Phase 2: The Unbiased Feed (Upcoming) — Introduce a custom-curated, non-manipulative feed engine. Safely inject neutral, educational, or random content to provide a healthy alternative timeline. • Phase 3: The Focus Lock (Future) — Add intentional behavioral friction and lock-in options, preventing you from overriding your detox settings when you need to focus most.

🌟 KEY FEATURES (CURRENTLY ACTIVE — PHASE 1)

📺 YOUTUBE FOCUS MODE • Hide Home Feed: Instantly clears the central video recommendation grid from the homepage to stop passive scrolling before it starts. • Hide Shorts & Shorts Everywhere: Removes Shorts shelves from the homepage/sidebar, and targets channel profile grids to scrub short-form loops entirely. • Hide Recommendations & End Screens: Clears suggested watch-next video panels and handles clean style resets to wipe out video card overlays when a clip concludes. • Hide Entire Sidebar: Fully collapses the watch-page sidebar context, expanding the video player layout to a clean, symmetrical full-width presentation. • Hide Comments: Removes the entire interactive comments platform to keep you away from time-wasting comment threads. • Deep Sidebar Customization: Individually toggle off noisy sidebar items including Subscriptions, Explore/Trending, Report History (with adjacent line-clearing fixes), and "More from YouTube" blocks. • Dynamic Music Mode: Blacks out the video rendering layer while keeping the audio streaming smoothly. Includes a synchronized wave-bar animator that halts when the video pauses. • Grayscale Mode: Desaturates the entire platform into high-contrast black and white to lower visual dopamine triggers.

📸 INSTAGRAM FOCUS MODE • Following Feed Enforcement: Automatically intercepts navigation to instagram.com and forces a structural redirect directly to your chronological "Following" timeline, bypassing the algorithmic "For You" feed. • Redirect to DMs / Conflict Resolution: Land straight on your message inbox upon launching the site, with built-in fallback redirect options if routing configurations conflict. • Hide Professional Dashboard: Strips away creator/business metric links and icons from the sidebar navigation panel. • Hide Stories (Home & Everywhere): Hide the home timeline tray, or entirely erase story highlights, tray containers, profile rings, and direct /stories/ paths platform-wide. • Hide Comments with Smart Capture: Completely removes comment lines, comment counts, item icons, and text entry forms while safely preserving the post author's original caption. • Square Profile Photos: Renders all profile pictures and story indicators as soft, clean squares for a highly structured, non-distracting interface layout. • Hide Notes & Likes: Erases status note bubbles from inbox lists and strips away vanity metric counts across posts, reels, hover cards, and profile follower metrics. • Hide Reels & Explore: Blocks entry menus and enforces instant URL redirections away from the main Explore matrix and Reels grids (while safely keeping profile asset tabs intact).

⚙️ GLOBAL DETOX CONTROLS • Master Switch: Pause or arm the entire extension's filter parameters simultaneously with one single click from the dashboard panel. • Real-Time Synchronization: Toggle options apply across all your active browser windows and open tabs instantaneously. • SPA-Proof Architecture: Works natively with dynamic Single-Page-Application client routers, maintaining instant filtering states without requiring slow webpage reloads.

🔒 PRIVACY FIRST Feed Free - Unbiased Feed functions entirely locally inside your browser sandbox. It does not track, collect, store, or transmit your browsing patterns, configuration settings, or private account data anywhere. All state choices remain securely stored right on your local device. Quick repository shortcut links are baked into the dashboard's security shield for instant open-source verification.