Website blockers: what they do and where they fall short

Extension, app, or system service

Browser extensions are the most common and the weakest. They cover one browser, they are disabled in four clicks, and every computer has a second browser installed by default.

A system-level service filters everything on the device at once, including apps that embed their own browser. If you are choosing between the two, this is the single biggest factor.

Blocklists go stale, content checks do not

A blocklist knows about the sites somebody has already categorised. That is a losing race against domains registered this morning, mirrors, and content sitting on sites nobody would think to block.

On-device content inspection judges what actually arrived. It is the difference between a bouncer with a list of names and one who can see who is in front of him.

The off switch problem

Most focus tools are built to be ended, because for a distraction problem that is the right design. Some can be made genuinely hard to end: Freedom’s Locked Mode refuses edits to an active session and can have its own off switch removed. What matters is which behaviour you actually get, and whether it survives the moment you want it not to.

The fix is not more willpower. It is a delay between deciding to unblock and being unblocked.

Choosing the delay

Match the delay to the urge. Distraction is mild and constant, so fifteen to twenty minutes kills the reflex without making you resent the tool. Compulsion is intense and occasional, so it needs long enough to outlast the spike, usually a couple of hours.

Removal should always be the longest, because it is the escape hatch that makes every other setting meaningless.

Blocklist, category, or content check

Products in this category use three quite different methods and describe all of them as blocking, which is why comparing feature lists gets you nowhere.

• A list of addresses.You name the sites, it stops them. Precise, entirely under your control, and blind to anything you did not think of in advance.
• Categories.Somebody else has classified millions of domains and you switch a category on. Broad coverage, and it inherits whatever that classifier got wrong, in both directions.
• On-device content checks.What actually arrived is inspected before it is shown, so a domain registered this morning is judged on what it contains rather than on whether anyone has catalogued it.
• What good setups do.All three. Lists for the specific things you know about, categories for breadth, content checks for the long tail nothing has named yet.

Where a blocker is the wrong tool entirely

Worth saying plainly on a page that exists to explain the category, because a tool used against the wrong problem produces a fortnight of frustration and the conclusion that none of this works.

If the pull is boredom rather than compulsion, changing what is available in the boring moments does more than blocking does. If you are avoiding a specific task rather than being distracted from it, no filter touches that, and the giveaway is blocking everything and then sitting in front of the same file anyway. If a colleague messaging you is the interruption, that is an agreement to make with people rather than software to install.

And if you are trying to control somebody else's use, this is not the category. Self-imposed tools assume the person setting the rules is the person living under them, and they behave badly when that is not true.