TimeRetriever hides short-video shelves and algorithmic feeds. All of it goes on day one — put back whatever you actually want.
Free on the Chrome Web Store. No account, no sign-in, no server.
The extension
No score, no streak, no page to go and visit. Everything it knows fits on the line next to the site’s name.
Five sites, everything folded, and next to each name how long you already spent there this week. It does not reopen where you left it: the entry screen is a decision you already made, not one to make again every time.
Open a site and every element is its own line, grouped the way the page groups them. Each line can carry hours of its own: Shorts gone only during the working day, comments gone all the time. The same line exists for the whole site, if you want it — LinkedIn gone entirely, or gone until six.
Need the LinkedIn feed back? Stop hiding there for five minutes, for the afternoon, or for the week, and leave the other four alone. It comes back on its own when the time runs out. Taking anything out of hiding asks you for a bit of arithmetic first, which is enough to outlast the impulse.
What it hides
All of it goes the moment you install. Putting any single piece back is one click, and any site you keep can be drained to black and white.
Shorts, everywhere they show up — home, search, sidebar, channel pages. The player itself stops opening, even from a link someone sent you.
The recommendations next to the video, the end screen grid and comments go too.
Reels and Explore in the navigation, and the suggested posts and accounts in the feed.
Reels in the middle of the feed are not reachable yet, so nothing here promises them.
The For You tab, Trending, Who to follow and Grok.
Following stays. The tab you did not choose is the one that goes.
The video carousel, the feed sort control, the news module and the feed itself.
Search, messages and your profile stay.
The inline video player, and the home, popular and all feeds.
Your subreddits keep working.
Nothing. It cannot run outside those five sites.
The list is fixed in the manifest and cannot grow without a new version being reviewed.
What it will never do
Not as a policy that could change next quarter. Each of these is the reason the extension still works.
That is a fight the platforms fund permanently, and staying out of it is what keeps this extension working.
It never follows, unfollows, likes, posts, votes or comments for you. People have lost their accounts forever over extensions that did.
No history, no page content, no identifiers, and no server to send them to. What it keeps — your switches, and how long you spent on each site — the browser keeps, on your machine.
How it works
The difference between not seeing a Short and seeing one for 200 milliseconds.
The section appears, is seen, and then vanishes. Your eye already did the work the shelf was built for.
The rule is in place before the first frame reaches the screen, so the section is never drawn at all.
Honest about limits
Websites change their markup without warning, and when they do, a hidden section can reappear. An automated check runs against the live sites every six hours, so breakage is found in hours instead of weeks. If you spot something first, the support address is the fastest way to get it fixed.
Nothing blocked, nothing touched, nothing leaving your computer.