Blink reminder and eye breaks for Microsoft Edge

What it does in Edge

Focused screen work lowers your blink rate, and more of your blinks stop short of closing. BlinkPause gives you a cue to blink with, drawn on the tab you’re looking at: Lids (soft eyelids close a little), Mist (the page blurs and clears) or Peek (a small eye blinks from a corner). It comes every minute by default, anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, never takes focus and never blocks a click.

Every 20 minutes (15 to 60), a small card asks you to look at something far away for 20 seconds, with a soft bowl and a spoken guide so you can keep your eyes off the screen. Three times a day it can guide a squeeze set instead. The eye in Edge’s toolbar blinks with every cue; click it for the pop-up, with Pause, Look away, Preview and Settings.

It holds back during calls in Edge (Teams, Meet, Zoom, Webex, Slack huddles and more), waits while you’re away or in another app, and lets breaks wait for fullscreen, video and a pause in your typing.

Install in a minute

Add BlinkPause to Edge from the Edge Add-ons store. Edge runs the same extension as Chrome, so it behaves the same way, and it shows no permission warning at install. A welcome opens: three practice blinks (when the lids close, close yours), then a look, then whether it may blink on your pages, then how often, with look-away breaks every 20 minutes.

Then put it where you can see it: open Extensions (the puzzle piece next to the address bar) and choose to show BlinkPause in the toolbar, so you can see its eye blink and pause it in one click. Alt+Shift+B opens the pop-up from any page. Pause or resume and Blink now can have shortcuts too; set them on Edge’s shortcuts page (edge://extensions/shortcuts).

Pages Edge won’t let extensions draw on

Edge keeps some pages to itself, for every extension: the new tab page, edge:// pages such as Settings, History and Extensions, the Edge Add-ons store, the PDF viewer and other extensions’ pages. BlinkPause can’t draw its lids there.

On those pages, if you gave access to all sites, the eye blinks in a small pop-up under BlinkPause’s toolbar button, part of Edge’s toolbar and with no access to the page. It opens only when you haven’t typed or moved the mouse for 15 seconds, so it never takes your keys, and it closes itself. Otherwise the toolbar eye blinks. A break shows its card in the same pop-up. In Settings, On the new tab page and browser pages lets you choose Toolbar pop-up or Toolbar only.

Permissions, explained

Storage keeps your settings (synced with your Edge profile if you use sync) and your daily counts on this computer. Alarms times the blinks and breaks. Idle tells it when you’re away. Scripting draws the cue on the page you’re looking at, when you’ve allowed it. Offscreen plays the sounds, because the extension’s background has no audio of its own. Context menus adds Pause, Blink now and Take a break now to the toolbar button’s right-click menu. Text to speech speaks the break guide.

Edge offers online voices as well as the ones on your computer. BlinkPause uses only voices installed on your computer, so the words never leave it; to add a better one on Windows, go to Settings, Time and language, Speech.

Two permissions are optional and asked for only when you choose. Site access, asked for in the welcome (Allow on all sites), lets it draw on the pages you read; Edge describes it as reading and changing your data on all websites, but BlinkPause only draws there and checks whether the page is fullscreen, whether a video plays and when a key was last pressed, never which key. Notifications is asked for only if you turn on Remind me in other apps. There is no camera, and BlinkPause itself makes no network connections.