HabitLab

Build better habits online! Tell HabitLab your goals, and it will determine the appropriate interventions via experimentation.

What is HabitLab?

HabitLab is a free, open-source project from the Stanford HCI Group available as a Chrome extension. It aims at helping its users reduce their online time by experimentally determining the appropriate interventions. These interventions could be anything - hiding your news feed, showing notifications if you've been on a site for too long, pausing videos or more. HabitLab uses these strategies on the sites that users want to spend less time on and periodically learns from their effectiveness to create an optimized, personalized online experience.

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Extension stats

By: https://habitlab.stanford.edu

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 5,000+

Rating: 4.29 (31)

Version: 1.0.277 (Last updated: 2021-04-24)

Creation date: 2020-05-25

Risk impact: High risk impact

Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 2

Permissions:

tabs
webNavigation
storage
history
idle
notifications
http://*/
https://*/

Size: 5.76M

Email: ge*****@cs.stanford.edu

URLs: Website ,Privacy policy

Ranking

# 13342 ▼ 5

Other rankings

#227 in Education

#30 in reduce keyword 5 ▼ 1

#66 in spend keyword 4 ▲ 1

#91 in goal keyword 9 ▼ 3

#132 in research keyword 31

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Other platforms

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Extension summary

Analyze keywords

HabitLab is an open-source research project from Stanford on helping users reduce their time online. It includes various tools like news feed blockers, comment hiders, and more. HabitLab will try out different tools and figure out what is most effective for you. Data on effectiveness will be recorded for research purposes.

HOW IT WORKS

Tell HabitLab which sites you want to spend less time on. We support all sites, including popular sites like Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Netflix. Each time you visit a site, we will intelligently choose an intervention (which use techniques such as hiding your news feed, hiding comments, pausing videos, showing notifications if you've been on a site too long, and more) to help you reduce your time on the site. If you don’t like an intervention, you can choose to disable it. HabitLab learns which interventions work best for you based on your browsing history and their past effectiveness, and uses this to more effectively help you reduce your time online.

ABOUT

HabitLab is an open-source project developed by the Stanford HCI Group. You can find source code at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab

PERMISSIONS

Chrome will ask you for the following permissions when you install. Here’s how we use them:

User reviews

These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews. Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.

Pros

Plenty of customizable tools to block or monitor web browsing
Helps track habits and improve productivity
Nudges allow control over time spent on specific sites without complete blocking
Users find it beneficial for reducing distractions
Great tool for increasing awareness of browsing habits

Cons

Many features are broken or not functioning properly
No longer actively maintained, leading to compatibility issues with recent Chrome versions
Battery draining issues reported by some users
Limited nudges currently work effectively
Frequent bugs and errors lead to frustration

Most mentioned

Doesn't work
Not maintained anymore
Best productivity extension
Great extension
Broken on the latest versions of Chrome

Recent reviews

Doesn't work

Alex, 2023-03-20

Extension is broken on Chrome (and Edge) 87, and doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. It appears that this extension was developed as part of someone's graduate school project and is no longer being actively maintained. Most of the "nudge" features are broken in the latest versions of Chrome which makes the extension mostly useless. Many issues have been opened through their recommended bug reporting process on Github but no one seems to be monitoring them anymore.