Firefox, Zen & all Gecko-based Browsers
noise / signal
Quietly protects your attention. No lectures. No guilt. Just a little resistance between you and the algorithm.
You open YouTube to find one video. Forty minutes later you're watching a stranger review kitchen appliances and you have no idea how you got there.
That's not a willpower failure. That's the algorithm doing its job — removing every tiny bit of friction between you and the next hit of dopamine.
Drift puts that friction back.
Not a blocker. Not a nanny. Not a productivity sermon. Just a few seconds of resistance at exactly the right moment — right before your brain enters autopilot. That's enough. Research on habit formation consistently shows that even 20 extra seconds of effort breaks the automatic behavior loop for most people.
The algorithm needs the reward to be instant. Delay it by three seconds and the spell breaks.
Drift intercepts page loads on sites you've marked as traps. Before anything renders, it applies your chosen mode:
| Mode | What happens |
|---|---|
| Delay Load (default) | Page loads silently 3–15 seconds slower. No UI, no explanation. Pure friction. |
| Ask Menu | A single question appears: "What are you here for?" Type your reason and continue — or go back. |
| Hard Block | Full wall outside your allowed hours. |
| Redirect | Bounces you to a destination from your library — Wikipedia, your notes app, wherever you actually want to be. |
| Close Tab | Tab silently closes. |
Set allowed hours per site. Inside your window — loads normally. Outside it — friction scales up automatically. 2am doom scrolling gets more resistance than a quick check at 7pm.
When you use Ask mode and type your intention, a small draggable note appears in the corner of the page reminding you why you came. Stays on that site for the session.
Build your own collection of go-to destinations. Add anything, export as JSON, share with friends, import community lists.
Drift handles the moment. Tide handles the reflection.
Tide is a companion extension that silently tracks your time across all tabs, then opens a daily review at your chosen time each evening. You sort each site — intentional or reclaim — and any sites you want to reclaim get sent straight to Drift with the mode of your choice.
Together they form a complete attention toolkit:
- Drift — friction in the moment, before the algorithm takes over
- Tide — reflection at end of day, prep for tomorrow
From the Firefox Add-ons store: Install Drift
Manual install (developer mode):
- Download the latest release zip from Releases
- Unzip it
- Go to
about:debuggingin Firefox - Click This Firefox → Load Temporary Add-on
- Select
manifest.jsonfrom the unzipped folder
These are built in, but you can add your own:
- Wikipedia — go learn something
- Readwise Reader — your reading list
- Kagi — search with purpose
- Notion — your notes
- Duolingo — learn a language
- Project Gutenberg — free books
- Lichess — play chess
Have a good one? Open a PR to add it to the curated list.
Pull requests welcome. A few areas that would be great to improve:
- Community redirect list (
redirects.jsonin the repo) - Chromium/Chrome support (MV3 port)
- Mobile Firefox support
- Stats export
Please open an issue before starting large changes.
Drift is built on a few well-studied ideas:
Friction works. Small increases in effort dramatically reduce impulsive behavior. A study by Thaler & Sunstein showed that default changes and minor friction effects have outsized impact on behavior — far more than motivation or willpower.
Implementation intentions. The Ask mode is based on Peter Gollwitzer's research showing that pre-committing to a specific intention ("I am here to do X") dramatically increases follow-through and reduces autopilot behavior.
The trigger is the problem. Habits aren't broken by fighting the behavior — they're broken by interrupting the trigger before the loop starts. Drift intervenes at exactly that moment: before the feed loads, before the dopamine cycle begins.
Drift stores everything locally in your browser. No data leaves your machine. No accounts. No analytics. No telemetry.
MIT — do whatever you want with it.
Part of the Drift + Tide attention toolkit.****