Case Study
A one-install Manifest V3 extension that rewrites 30+ tracked sites (YouTube, X, Reddit, Google…) to privacy-friendly frontends. No settings, no thinking required.
Every time I opened YouTube, X, or Reddit in a normal browser, I was being profiled — cookies, trackers, fingerprinting — before I'd even scrolled. The usual answer, "just use a private frontend", means juggling five tools and remembering five different URLs. Privacy tooling shouldn't be homework.
I designed and built the entire extension solo: the redirect map that knows how each tracked site's URLs are shaped, the Manifest V3 packaging, and the Chrome/Firefox/Edge builds.
The hard part was the redirect map. Every site has its own URL quirks, and a naive replace("youtube.com", "invidious.example") breaks half the URLs. The map has to handle watch IDs, shorts, embeds, and paths without breaking the content — so the extension had to understand what kind of URL it was looking at, not just string-swap domains.
270★ on GitHub and a working install on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. One install, and YouTube becomes Invidious, X becomes a lightweight client, Reddit becomes a readable alternative — automatically.
The project stays alive through public maintenance: users open issues when a site breaks or a frontend goes down, and those issues drive the fixes. The best privacy tool is the one you don't notice — so most of the work now is keeping it invisible.
Want the longer version? How Predirect became my most-starred project →
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