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A new look, a new icon, and Sieve's largest release yet: an Ad & Trackers
section, an AI Blocker, a Cool-off lock, and a Dark Pattern Blocker that shows
its work. The new blockers are all off until you turn them on, and, as
always, nothing leaves your device.
A new look
- Paper and ink. The settings, toolbar popup, blocked page, welcome page and pause screen were all redrawn, with green kept for one meaning only: a switch that is on.
- Settings shows one section at a time, with the sections listed down the side and a Find a setting box at the top (press
/to jump to it). - A new icon. The shield is gone; Sieve's mark is now a sieve, the same in the toolbar, popup, settings, blocked page and beside search results. At the toolbar's smallest size it is drawn by hand, pixel by pixel.
- New Appearance setting under Advanced: Match my system, Light or Dark. It reaches everything Sieve shows you, and nothing about the sites themselves.
Ad & Trackers (Beta)
A new section with one master switch, off until you turn it on. Behind it are
separate parts that work, and fail, in different ways:
- Tracker blocking stops analytics, fingerprinting and behaviour-tracking services. Ad-network blocking stops the ad exchanges and delivery networks, and is the more likely of the two to upset a site. Both are built from EasyPrivacy and EasyList and ship inside the extension, so nothing is fetched while you browse.
- YouTube ads get their own switch: Sieve edits them out of YouTube's own page data as it loads, covering video ads, feed tiles, promoted search results, banners and the ads between Shorts. When YouTube holds a video back or refuses it, Sieve asks again in a way YouTube does not put ads in front of, and only as a last resort fast-forwards ads, muted at 16×. Expect this one to break and need updates; when it does, the ads simply come back.
- Facebook ads: sponsored posts are removed from the feed as it arrives, plus the right-hand column, Marketplace, Watch and search. Sieve reads Facebook's deliberately scrambled "Sponsored" label the way you do, in other languages too.
- "Please turn off your ad blocker" walls: most never appear, because Sieve answers the check instead of letting it fail. One that appears anyway is cleared, along with the scroll lock, the blur and the grey dimming layer behind it.
- Empty ad boxes are tidied away once Sieve is sure they will stay empty, so the page closes up instead of reading as full of holes.
- Floating videos is a separate switch: the video that shrinks into a corner and follows you down a news article goes back where the site first put it. YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, video calls and picture-in-picture are left alone.
- The Protection Dashboard gets an "Ads & trackers" section with today's and the week's counts. Only running totals are kept, never which site or which tracker.
If a site misbehaves, add it to your Allowlist: Sieve stands down on that
site alone.
AI Blocker
Three switches under Site Blocking, all off by default: AI chatbots and
assistants, AI writing and homework tools (including "humanizer" sites),
and AI companion and roleplay chat. It blocks the chat sites themselves, not
everything a company owns, so pages that use these services behind the scenes
still work. Search engines' own AI answers and image, video and voice
generators are not covered; your own Blocked sites list takes those.
Cool-off
A wait before anything that weakens your protection: 1 hour, 24 hours, 3 days
or 7 days, under Lock. Turning a blocker off, allowing a site, raising a limit
or removing your PIN is asked for first, and unlocks only once the wait is over.
It needs no PIN, because a PIN you know yourself is no lock in a weak moment,
and a wait still is. Nothing turns off on its own: when the wait ends, that one
change stays unlocked for a day for you to make yourself, or let lapse.
Dark Pattern Blocker
- It shows its work. The toolbar popup's new On this page lists what the page tried, with one plain sentence each. Show me scrolls to it; Undo puts it back exactly as the site had it. The toolbar badge counts tricks only.
- It proves fakes instead of guessing. A countdown that restarts when you come back is fake, and Sieve says so with the times; one that kept its end time is left alone. A stock count that never moves, or a sale that "ends today" two days running, is caught too. It keeps a few numbers for 30 days, on this device only, filed under scrambled codes, and one button forgets it all.
- You choose how firmly it responds: Gentle (labels only), Balanced (the default) or Firm.
- Free trials that turn into payments: Sieve says plainly what a trial becomes and when, in whatever currency the page uses, and offers an on-device reminder two days before the first charge.
- Fake popularity: the "Sarah from Ohio just bought this" pop-ups are hidden, and a "23 people are viewing this" that never moves is dimmed and says so.
Clean up YouTube
- Hide search suggestions: stops YouTube asking for the list at all, so half-typed searches are no longer sent off to build recommendations from.
- A new Sidebar group: hide the sign-in prompt, "More from YouTube" and the sidebar footer. Hide Explore has moved here too.
- Fixed: Hide end cards now catches the new player's end-of-video wall.
- Fixed: Turn off autoplay actually turns it off; it used to click before YouTube was listening.
Fixes worth knowing about
- The Dark Pattern Blocker matched letters instead of whole words, so short words hid inside longer ones ("no" inside Know, "pass" inside password). Ordinary buttons were reworded to "No thanks", unrelated checkboxes got the "pre-checked" badge, and the cookie-banner leveller missed the commonest kind of banner. All three are fixed and now have tests. This one matters because the Dark Pattern Blocker is on unless you turned it off.
- The Popup & Click Hijack Blocker was not running on most sites: it waited for pages to stop changing, and modern pages never do. It now checks as the page goes.
- Security fix in the same blocker: a page could add itself to your allow list permanently, without asking. That route is gone, and "Always allow this site" has moved into the toolbar popup, where a page cannot reach it. This only applied if you had that blocker switched on.
- Privacy fix: two word lists could be requested by any page, which gave away that Sieve was installed. They are now built in, out of a page's reach.
Lighter and faster
- A little under half of what Sieve used to put on every page. The cookie-banner rejecter now loads only when you use it.
- Long pages no longer stutter after loading; the bad-language filter's pass over a long page is now effectively instant.
- Smoother scrolling on pages with adverts, and background tabs stop working until you come back to them.
- The optional comment-filtering model is released after ten minutes unused.
- A smaller download: about a tenth smaller on Chrome, a quarter on Firefox.
Upgrading
Settings carry over. Ad & Trackers, Floating videos, the AI Blocker, Cool-off
and the new YouTube switches are all off until you turn them on.
The Dark Pattern Blocker is the exception, because it is on unless you turned it
off: its new parts (On this page, free-trial warnings and fake-popularity
hiding) arrive switched on with it. Each has its own switch under Browsing, and
Gentle mode labels without changing anything.
Full changelog: 1.3.0...1.5.0