Blink reminder and eye breaks for Firefox

What it does in Firefox

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 Firefox’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 Firefox (Meet, Zoom, Teams, 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 Firefox from addons.mozilla.org; it needs Firefox 142 or later. Firefox shows no permission warning at install, and BlinkPause tells Firefox it collects no data. 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.

There is no pinning step: BlinkPause puts its button straight on Firefox’s toolbar, not in the Extensions panel, so you can see its eye blink and pause it in one click. Alt+Shift+B opens the pop-up from any page. To give Pause or resume and Blink now a shortcut, open Add-ons and themes, then Manage Extension Shortcuts from the gear menu.

Pages Firefox won’t let extensions draw on

Firefox keeps some pages to itself, for every add-on: about: pages such as the new tab page, Settings and Add-ons and themes, Reader View, the PDF viewer, view-source pages, addons.mozilla.org and a few other Mozilla sites such as support.mozilla.org and your Mozilla account. BlinkPause can’t draw its lids there.

On those pages, if you gave access to all sites, the eye blinks in BlinkPause’s own toolbar pop-up: the same panel that drops down when you click its button, opened by BlinkPause itself and closed again after the blink. It belongs to Firefox’s toolbar, so it needs no window of its own and no access to the page. It opens only when Firefox is the window in front and you haven’t typed or moved the mouse for 15 seconds, so it never takes your keys. Otherwise, or in an older Firefox that can’t open it this way, the toolbar eye blinks. 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 through your Mozilla account if you use Firefox Sync for add-ons) 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. Menus adds Pause, Blink now and Take a break now to the toolbar button’s right-click menu; it’s Firefox’s name for what Chrome calls context menus.

Firefox needs two fewer permissions than Chrome. There is no offscreen document: in Firefox, BlinkPause’s background page plays the sounds itself. And there is no text-to-speech permission: the spoken guide uses Firefox’s built-in speech with voices installed on your computer only, so the words never leave it.

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; Firefox calls it access to your data for 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. You can review or remove it any time from BlinkPause’s page in Add-ons and themes. 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.