Block distracting websites in Firefox with Impulse Blocker

Want to get things done, but find yourself distracted by social networks or other websites? We have all been there.

There are some add-ons which you help you become more productive. ImPulse Blocker is an extension that can block websites temporarily. The add-on is easy to use and to the point, and makes you more productive provided that you keep a certain level of self-discipline as there are ways around its blocks.

A "block" icon appears on the toolbar after you have installed the add-on. To start using it, access a website that you wish to block. Once the webpage has loaded, click on the Impulse Blocker icon and select "block website". For e.g. If you wanted to block Twitter, the button would read "Block Twitter.com".

When you have blocked the page, reload it and a message will say " Impulse Blocker. Your impulse to visit www.Twitter.com is successfully blocked!".

Basically, the extension redirects the blocked website to its own local URL and prevents it from loading. There is no other option on the "blocked" page that you can interact with.

If you want to enable/disable Impulse Blocker, click on the extension's toolbar icon and select the On or Off buttons. You may optionally pause the blocking behavior by using the time settings that appear in the extension's pop-up GUI, it has the following pause options: 5/10/15 or 30 minutes, or 1 Hour or 3 hours.

What if you blocked a website by mistake? That's easy to fix. Click the add-on's button and hit the gears icon in the top right corner of the pop-up. This takes you to Impulse Blocker's settings page. It has a large banner that indicates whether the blocker is on or off, click the button to its right side to toggle the switch.

The list of websites that you have blocked are displayed on this page. If you want to remove a site from the list, click on the Delete button next to it.

The text box in the top right corner of the Settings page can be used to add websites that you want to block. This is handy if you don't want to visit the website in question, but wish to restrict access to it. Enter the name of the site and the add-on will automatically block the entire website including the top level domain and all its sub-domains. You don't have to include http, https or www while adding a website manually, e.g. adding facebook.com to Impulse Blocker will block www.facebook.com, https://ift.tt/g8FRpY, etc.

Note: The add-on's official guide says that we can skip the .com domain too, but I couldn't get it working and had to enter the suffix as well.

There are two options on Impulse Blocker's settings page, and these allow you to disable the On/Off buttons and the Pause buttons in the pop-up. Enabling these will provide you with an additional obstacle that prevents you from accessing the blocked webpages.

Impulse Blocker is an open source add-on. It is a Firefox recommended extension.

If you're looking for a parental control solution or a way to permanently block websites, this is not it. But if you want to stop yourself from cute cat videos and concentrate on work/studies, Impulse Blocker may help you. if you don't fall into the trap of unblocking sites or using a different browser just to access sites.

Note: If you unblock a website and still can't access it, close the tab and open the site in a new tab.

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