I recently discovered that it also acts as a great anti-productivity page blocker. Simply add your top social and news addiction pages to the blacklist and you’re set.
I use Firefox only for work, which has helped me immensely to stay focused and not “just quickly check hacker news for the tenth time in an hour” (as much as I like to ;)).
I do something similar, I noticed that a link to a tweet in an article that I'm reading will always result in me clicking through and then wasting time catching up.
I used this filter, it makes twitter links look like normal text:
On my phone, I blocked the feeds for Hacker News, Reddit and a few other sites. I blocked notification badges on most sites. I can still get to individual pages from Google, but I can't mindlessly browse those websites.
It's really effective. I don't even know what to do with my phone any more.
> I don't even know what to do with my phone any more.
I hear there's some way you can use an app on your phone to have a voice conversation with someone else, but apparently you need to know a magic number?
I'm told there was even a time when the number only addressed a location, so you would have to figure out who was talking on the other end through a complex linguistic handshake.
And it didn't even have identity authentication, past a basic voiceprint!
Yes, the ability to block parts of pages is handy too.
I've not taken to blocking whole sites yet. But sites with "recommendations" attached to every page are a real distraction. I block them on stackoverflow, otherwise I end up reading about the etymology of some obscure word or advice for a dungeon master in a weird D&D scenario =)
I use Firefox only for work, which has helped me immensely to stay focused and not “just quickly check hacker news for the tenth time in an hour” (as much as I like to ;)).