I noticed a pattern I didn’t like. I’d open Facebook to check one thing and ten minutes later I’d surface from a video I never meant to watch. A video would start playing as I scrolled, or a wall of Reels thumbnails would catch my eye, and that was it. Into the sinkhole.
Quitting Facebook felt like overkill, I just wanted the sinkhole gone.
So I asked Claude to build me a Chrome extension to deal with it.
Want it?
The extension is and open source (code here). It runs entirely in your browser: no account, no tracking, no data collection. The only permission it asks for is storage, to remember your three on/off toggles. It works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and other Chromium-based browsers.
There’s no web store listing (yet), and installing takes about a minute:
Download the zip from the
latest release (the
fb-video-block.zipfile) and unzip it.In your browser, go to
chrome://extensions.Turn on Developer mode (toggle in the top-right corner).
Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
Reload any open Facebook tabs. That’s it, the videos are gone.
Everything is on by default. If you ever want videos back, click the extension’s icon in your toolbar and flip the toggles.
One honest caveat: Facebook changes its layout all the time, and the extension finds videos by recognizing the current one. If something starts slipping through, it may need a small update. The GitHub page is the place to report it.
If you’ve got a friend who keeps saying “I don’t even know why I was watching that”, send them this.