In 1965 screens got 1.2 hours a day. Now they get 7. The interface did that.

#chrome #productivity #opensource #digitalwellbeing

In 1965, the average American spent about 1.2 hours a day in front of a screen. Mostly television. Scheduled, linear, with natural stopping points built in.

In 2024, US adults average over 7 hours a day. Not because the content got 6x better. Because the interfaces were redesigned to remove stopping points.

That is not a coincidence. It is engineering.

The television era grew screen time gradually through adoption. The post-2010 acceleration is different in kind. In 2006, Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll. By 2009 to 2012, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest had adopted it. In 2012, algorithmic feeds replaced chronological ones. In 2013, YouTube autoplay became default. By 2016, TikTok's loop format had made the mechanism ubiquitous.

Each change shared the same design intent: remove the moment of decision. No end of page. No "next episode in 5 seconds." Just the next episode. No sorted by time. Just sorted by what keeps you watching.

When platforms switched from paginated feeds to infinite scroll, session metrics jumped. NBC reported 30% more mobile pageviews, Quartz saw 50% more stories per session. These are real platform numbers. They are why the Next Page button was removed.

I built UnScroll to put it back.

What UnScroll does

Install it, and every infinitely-scrolling page gets a numbered nav bar at the bottom:

‹  1  2  3  …  47  ›

Use Z and X (optimised for right-hand mouse users) or ← → arrows to flip pages. Sub-scroll containers like Wikipedia's TOC, ChatGPT's conversation sidebar and chat contact lists get their own smaller nav bar that scales to the container width.

It runs on everything: Reddit, Twitter/X, YouTube, Wikipedia, Gmail, ChatGPT, Gemini, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Any website with a scrollable area.

Features beyond pagination:

Greyscale mode (renders the entire page in black and white, making interfaces less stimulating)
Disable Autoplay (pauses all videos on page load)
Mute Notifications (hides unread badges and notification counts)
Hide Like Counts (removes social engagement metrics)
Text-Only mode (strips all photos and videos from social feeds)

Why scrolling itself is the problem

Scrolling is not neutral. Research shows it mimics the continuous visual flow that evolved to signal movement through a physical environment. It is the same mechanism that motivated early humans to explore. Platforms exploit this at a neurological level.

Infinite scroll removes the one thing that interrupts that flow: the end of the page.

This disproportionately affects:

Neurodivergent people (ADHD, autism, and impulsivity profiles are significantly more vulnerable to compulsive scroll behaviour)
Children (whose impulse regulation is still developing)
Anyone in a low-willpower state (tired, stressed, or bored)

Utrecht University researchers have specifically advised parliament that education and design interventions are needed around screen use for children, with infinite scroll cited as a primary mechanism.

A 2025 study in Marketing Theory (Hoang & Lascaux) found that features like infinite scroll and autoplay drive digital overconsumption through "automated mechanisms." Not content quality, not notifications, but the structural removal of stopping points. Users described opening apps "without a conscious thought," with deliberate action displaced by reflex.

The extension is step one

The browser extension targets the web. But the pattern exists everywhere: mobile apps, OS interfaces, TVs. The goal is to unscroll all of tech, starting with putting the page back in webpage.

UnScroll is free and open source. There is no business model that depends on you being on the site longer.

How it works technically

UnScroll is a Manifest V3 content script (~2,650 lines, zero dependencies). Here is what makes it non-trivial:

Scroll container detection. Every site manages scroll differently. UnScroll detects whether the page uses window scroll, an inner scrollable container (YouTube's ytd-app, Facebook's #scrollview), or an AI chat's managed scroll element. It has explicit handling for 15+ major sites.

SPA navigation. Reddit, Twitter, YouTube replace page content without reloading. UnScroll patches history.pushState and popstate to re-initialise on every route change.

Shadow DOM bar. The nav bar lives in a closed Shadow DOM. Page JavaScript can not query-select it, and site CSS can not accidentally break it.

Sub-scroll detection. A second pass finds nested scrollable elements (sidebars, TOC panels, chat histories) and attaches mini nav bars. The width-aware renderer switches to arrows-only mode for containers < 220px wide.

Form-typing guard. The keyboard shortcuts check walks the full DOM tree for contentEditable, [role="textbox"], [role="searchbox"], so typing in any editor, compose box, or search field never triggers a page turn.

Autoplay blocking. Uses a MutationObserver to catch dynamically-injected videos, removes the autoplay attribute, and calls .pause() immediately on load.