Best Browser Extensions for ADHD (2026)

ADHD brains don’t struggle with the internet because they lack willpower. They struggle because the internet is an infinite novelty machine — and ADHD brains are wired to chase novelty. Every new tab is a micro-dose of dopamine. Every notification is a pull away from the thing you were doing.

Standard productivity extensions aren’t designed for this. They assume you can resist the urge to open a new tab, remember what you were working on 30 seconds ago, and self-regulate your browsing time. ADHD makes all three of those things harder.

The extensions in this guide are different. They reduce the number of decisions your brain has to make, create friction against impulsive browsing, and externalize the time awareness that ADHD brains lack. None of them are a cure — but the right combination can meaningfully reduce how often your browser derails your day.

If you’re also looking for non-browser tools, we covered the best ADHD apps in a separate guide.

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Quick Comparison

	Extension	ADHD symptom	Free	Chrome	Firefox
	LeechBlock	Impulsive browsing	Yes	Yes	Yes
	StayFocusd	Time blindness on sites	Yes	Yes	No
	Forest	Sustaining focus	Yes	Yes	No
	Todoist	Task capture / forgetting	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Momentum	Losing track of priorities	Yes	Yes	No
	TickTick	Organization + focus	Yes	Yes	No
	RescueTime	Time blindness	Yes (limited)	Yes	Yes

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Distraction Blocking

This is the most important category for ADHD. If you can reduce the number of times your browser pulls you off-task, everything else gets easier.

LeechBlock — Best rule-based blocker

Price: Free · Platforms: Chrome, Firefox

LeechBlock gives you granular, time-based blocking rules. Set up “Block Twitter from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays” or “Allow Reddit for 15 minutes per hour.” You can create up to 30 separate rule sets, each with different sites, schedules, and behaviors.

For ADHD, the scheduling matters. You don’t have to remember to start a blocking session — the rules run automatically. Set it up once, and your weekday browsing is guardrailed without daily effort.

LeechBlock also supports password protection: set a random string you can’t memorize, and the extension becomes harder to disable on impulse. It’s one of the few extensions that works on both Chrome and Firefox, which matters if you use multiple browsers.

Best for: People who want detailed, automatic scheduling without thinking about it daily.

Limitations: It’s still an extension. You can disable it in chrome://extensions if you know the trick. The UI is functional but dense — not the friendliest setup experience.

StayFocusd — Best time-budget blocker

Price: Free · Platform: Chrome

StayFocusd gives you a daily time budget for distracting sites. You get, say, 10 minutes on Reddit per day. Once it’s spent, the site is blocked until midnight. The “Nuclear Option” blocks everything on your list for a set period with no undo.

The time-budget approach is uniquely useful for ADHD. It doesn’t say “no” — it says “not anymore today.” That’s psychologically easier to accept than a hard block, and the countdown creates visible time awareness that ADHD brains naturally lack.

Best for: People who want to limit distraction sites rather than block them entirely.

Limitations: Chrome-only. The extension can be disabled in two clicks. The time budget resets daily, so there’s no cumulative tracking. For a deeper look at blocking tools, see our best website blockers of 2026 guide.

Unhook (YouTube) — Best for YouTube rabbit holes

Price: Free · Platform: Chrome

If YouTube is your ADHD kryptonite, Unhook removes the parts that cause rabbit holes. It hides the recommendation sidebar, the homepage feed, trending, comments, and auto-play. You can still search for and watch specific videos — but the algorithm stops feeding you “one more.”

For ADHD brains, YouTube’s recommendation engine is particularly dangerous. Every “Recommended” thumbnail is a novelty hit. Unhook cuts off the supply while keeping YouTube functional for intentional use. If you want to block YouTube entirely, that’s an option too — but Unhook is the middle ground.

Best for: People who use YouTube for work or learning but get pulled into unrelated content.

Limitations: YouTube only. Doesn’t affect the YouTube mobile app. Can be disabled like any extension.

News Feed Eradicator — Best for social media feeds

Price: Free · Platform: Chrome

News Feed Eradicator replaces the infinite scroll feeds on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others with a motivational quote. You can still use the platforms — post, message, search, check groups — but the feed is gone.

This is surgical. It removes the specific feature that causes the most ADHD damage (infinite scrolling) without removing the platforms entirely. For people who need social media for work or community but lose hours to the feed, it’s the best compromise.

Best for: People who need social media but not the feed.

Limitations: Extension-only, easily disabled. Doesn’t affect mobile apps. Some platforms update their HTML frequently, which can break the extension temporarily.

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Tab Management

Tab hoarding is one of the most common ADHD browser behaviors. You open a tab “to read later,” then another, then another — and suddenly you have 47 tabs open, no idea what’s in any of them, and your browser is using 8 GB of RAM.

xTab — Best simple tab limiter

Price: Free · Platform: Chrome

xTab enforces a hard cap on how many tabs you can have open. Set it to 10, and when you open an 11th tab, the oldest one closes automatically. No decisions, no “manage your tabs” guilt — the limit is enforced for you.

For ADHD, this constraint is freeing. You don’t have to decide which tabs to close. The extension makes that decision. It forces you to work with what you have instead of accumulating an infinite backlog of “I’ll read this later” tabs.

Best for: People who routinely have 30+ tabs open and feel overwhelmed.

Limitations: No way to pin or protect specific tabs from being closed. The auto-close can be surprising if you forget it’s running.

OneTab — Best for tab cleanup

Price: Free · Platforms: Chrome, Firefox

OneTab converts all your open tabs into a single list page. One click, 40 tabs become a saved list. Your browser goes from 8 GB of RAM usage to hundreds of MB. You can restore individual tabs or the whole group later.

For ADHD, OneTab works as a “panic button.” When you realize you’ve opened 30 tabs during a research tangent, OneTab lets you save them without the guilt of closing them — and without the cognitive load of keeping them open. It’s permission to start fresh.

Best for: People who accumulate tabs during research sessions and need a quick reset.

Limitations: The saved tab lists can themselves become clutter. No automatic tab limiting — you have to click the button.

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Focus Timers

Time blindness is a core ADHD symptom. An hour feels like ten minutes. Ten minutes feels like an hour. Browser-based timers create external time awareness that ADHD brains can’t generate internally.

Forest — Best visual focus timer

Price: Free (Chrome) · Platform: Chrome, iOS, Android

Forest grows a virtual tree while you stay focused. Leave the tab or visit a blocked site, and the tree dies. Over time, you build a forest that visually represents your focus sessions.

The gamification is lightweight enough to sustain long-term use. ADHD brains respond well to visual progress and gentle stakes — killing a tree feels bad enough to create a pause before you impulsively open Twitter, but not so bad that you avoid using the app after a slip.

Forest’s Chrome extension blocks sites you choose during active sessions. It’s not as strong as a dedicated blocker, but the visual feedback adds a layer of motivation that pure blockers don’t provide.

Best for: People who respond to visual rewards and need a gentle accountability system.

Limitations: The blocking is easy to bypass (close the extension popup). The tree mechanic may lose novelty after months. Doesn’t address tab management or task organization.

TickTick — Best timer + task manager combo

Price: Free / Premium from $3/mo · Platform: Chrome

TickTick’s Chrome extension combines a task manager with a built-in Pomodoro timer. Plan your tasks, then work through them in 25-minute focus sprints — all from the extension popup.

For ADHD, the integration matters. Switching between a task app and a timer app adds friction and decision points. TickTick keeps both in one place: pick the next task, start the timer, work. The extension syncs with TickTick’s mobile and desktop apps, so your task list stays consistent everywhere.

Best for: People who want task management and a focus timer without juggling multiple tools.

Limitations: The free tier has limited Pomodoro stats. The extension is a mini-version of the full app — complex projects are better managed in the web or desktop app.

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Task Capture

ADHD brains are notoriously bad at holding tasks in working memory. If you think of something and don’t capture it in under 30 seconds, it’s gone. Browser extensions that let you capture tasks instantly, without leaving your current tab, are critical.

Todoist — Best for instant task capture

Price: Free / Pro from $5/mo · Platform: Chrome, Firefox

Todoist’s extension lets you add a task from any webpage in under 5 seconds. Hit the keyboard shortcut, type “Email client about invoice Friday #Work,” and it’s captured with a date, project, and context — all parsed from natural language.

For ADHD, the speed matters. If capturing a task requires opening an app, navigating to a project, clicking “add task,” typing a title, setting a date, and clicking save — you won’t do it. Todoist reduces that to one shortcut and one line of text. The extension also lets you save the current webpage as a task with a link, which is perfect for “I need to deal with this later” moments.

Best for: People who think of tasks while browsing and need to capture them before they disappear.

Limitations: The free tier limits you to 5 active projects. Todoist’s strength is capture and organization — it won’t help with time management or blocking.

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New Tab Replacements

Every new tab is a decision point. The default new tab page shows your most visited sites — which, for ADHD brains, is usually the same sites you’re trying to avoid. Replacing it removes the trigger.

Momentum — Best focus-oriented new tab

Price: Free / Plus from $3.33/mo · Platform: Chrome

Momentum replaces your new tab with a clean dashboard: a photo, a greeting, your main focus for the day, and a to-do list. That’s it. No news feed, no trending topics, no most-visited shortcuts.

The “What is your main focus today?” prompt is deceptively powerful for ADHD. It forces you to declare a single priority — and then shows it to you every time you open a new tab. That repeated visual reminder compensates for the ADHD tendency to forget what you were supposed to be working on.

Best for: People who open new tabs compulsively and need a visual anchor to their daily priority.

Limitations: The free version is basic (one to-do list, no integrations). The focus reminder only works if you actually set it each morning — which requires a habit.

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Time Awareness

RescueTime — Best for understanding where time goes

Price: Free (limited) / Premium from $12/mo · Platforms: Chrome, Firefox, desktop apps

RescueTime runs silently in the background and tracks exactly how you spend your time across websites and apps. At the end of the week, it shows you a report: 3 hours on Reddit, 2 hours on YouTube, 45 minutes of actual work.

For ADHD brains, the data is a reality check. Time blindness means you genuinely don’t know where your time goes. You think you “quickly checked Twitter” for 5 minutes — RescueTime shows it was 40. That awareness alone can motivate changes. The premium version includes focus sessions with blocking built in, but the free tracking is where the real value lies.

Best for: People who don’t know where their time goes and want data before making changes.

Limitations: Tracking alone doesn’t change behavior — you need to act on the data. The free tier is basic. Premium is expensive at $12/mo compared to alternatives.

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The Elephant in the Room: Extensions Can Be Disabled

Every extension on this list shares one fundamental weakness: you can turn it off. Open chrome://extensions, flip a toggle, and the blocker is gone. For neurotypical people, this is fine — the friction is enough. For ADHD brains in a moment of low impulse control, two clicks is nothing.

This isn’t a flaw in these extensions. It’s a limitation of the extension model itself. Chrome is designed to let users control their extensions. There’s no way for an extension to prevent its own removal.

If you’ve tried extension-based blockers and found yourself disabling them repeatedly, the problem isn’t discipline — it’s architecture. You need blocking that can’t be toggled off.

A different approach: blocking at the browser level

Browwwser is a Chromium-based browser with blocking built directly into the engine. When a site is blocked, the request is killed before the page starts loading. There’s no extension to disable in chrome://extensions, no background process to kill, no workaround.

It also blocks macOS desktop apps (TikTok, Discord, Steam) and includes lock mode — lock your blocklist for 1 to 7 days with no override. Scheduled blocking runs automatically during work hours without needing to start a session manually.

Because it’s Chromium-based, all Chrome extensions work. You can combine Browwwser’s engine-level blocking with any of the extensions listed above — Forest for visual timers, Todoist for task capture, Momentum for new tab focus.

Limitation: macOS only. No Windows, no Linux, no iOS.

If you’ve tried extensions and keep finding ways around them, Browwwser removes the option of overriding yourself. For a detailed comparison of blocking approaches, see our website blocker comparison.

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Recommended ADHD Extension Stacks

Not every extension works for every person. Here are three combinations based on what you struggle with most.

Stack 1: “I can’t stop opening distracting sites”

• LeechBlock — scheduled blocking for work hours
• Unhook — removes YouTube recommendations
• News Feed Eradicator — removes social media feeds
• Upgrade path: If you keep disabling these, switch to Browwwser for engine-level blocking

Stack 2: “I lose track of time and forget tasks”

• Forest — visual timer with gentle stakes
• Todoist — instant task capture from any page
• RescueTime — weekly reality check on time usage

Stack 3: “I have 50 tabs and no idea what I’m doing”

• xTab — hard cap on open tabs
• OneTab — panic button to save and close everything
• Momentum — new tab reminds you of your daily priority

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Frequently Asked Questions

What Chrome extensions are best for ADHD?

The most helpful categories are tab limiters (to prevent tab hoarding), distraction blockers (to cut off impulsive browsing), and visual timers (to fight time blindness). Specific picks: xTab for tab limits, LeechBlock or StayFocusd for blocking, and Forest for visual focus timers.

Can browser extensions really help with ADHD?

Yes, but with limits. Extensions reduce environmental triggers — fewer tabs, blocked distractions, visible timers. They don’t treat ADHD itself. Think of them as guardrails: they won’t steer the car, but they keep you from going off the road. For stronger protection, a browser with built-in blocking like Browwwser removes the option to disable extensions entirely.

Are ADHD browser extensions free?

Most are. LeechBlock, StayFocusd, Forest (Chrome), Unhook, and News Feed Eradicator are all free. Todoist and TickTick have generous free tiers. Momentum’s free version covers the basics.

Do these extensions work in browsers other than Chrome?

Most work in Chromium-based browsers like Edge, Brave, Opera, and Browwwser. LeechBlock also has a Firefox version. Safari support is limited — most extensions listed here are Chrome/Chromium only.

Why do I keep disabling my blocker extensions?

Because extensions are designed to be user-removable. Any Chrome extension can be disabled in two clicks via chrome://extensions. This is a fundamental weakness for ADHD brains — in a moment of low impulse control, the blocker disappears. If this keeps happening, consider a tool that can’t be disabled at all. We wrote about the science behind why ADHD makes screen time harder — understanding the mechanism can help.

Should I use multiple extensions or one all-in-one tool?

For ADHD, fewer tools is generally better — each additional app is another thing to set up, maintain, and remember. Start with one extension that addresses your biggest problem (usually distraction blocking), use it for two weeks, then add a second if needed. Avoid installing five extensions at once.