Marginalize

About

Marginalize is an ad blocker with a specific obsession: the *marginal* ad real estate that hurts browsing the most — sidebar boxes, sticky banners, full-page overlays, fake "close" buttons that open new tabs, and the click-hijack popunders that streaming and download sites pile on. The name is a pun. We marginalize the ads.

What makes Marginalize different from a stock blocker:

▸ POPUNDER DEFENSE — Most ad blockers stop the network request and call it a day. Marginalize also patches window.open in the page's own JavaScript world at document_start, so when a sketchy site's onclick handler tries to spawn a new tab anywhere you click, the call is intercepted and silently swallowed. You click, nothing pops, the legitimate click still works.

▸ FAKE-X CLOSE BUTTON FIX — Some ad overlays wrap their close button in an ad link. You click the × to dismiss the popup, but instead it opens the ad. Marginalize detects close-looking elements inside ad-shaped containers and rewrites the behavior: the click actually closes the container instead of launching the ad.

▸ CLICK-HIJACK NEUTRALIZER — Detects invisible full-viewport <a target="_blank"> overlays (the ones that absorb every click on a sketchy streaming page) and disables them so the underlying content becomes clickable again.

▸ UNRELATED-OUTBOUND BLOCKER — When you click a link that goes to a completely different domain and the URL looks like a redirect or affiliate tracker (/click?, ?utm_source=, /redirect/, /go/, known popunder networks), the click is cancelled. A built-in allowlist (Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, Google, Reddit, etc.) is never blocked.

▸ POSITION-BASED COSMETIC HIDING — Hand-tuned CSS that targets sidebar, banner, sponsored-content, sticky-promo, and player-overlay containers by name and position, on top of full EasyList cosmetic rules.

▸ NETWORK BLOCKING — 150 bundled blocking rules for the worst ad/tracker/popunder networks, auto-refreshed daily with EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Up to 25,000 additional dynamic rules from the upstream lists.

▸ LIVE PER-PAGE COUNTER — An optional pill in the bottom-right corner of every page shows how many requests Marginalize blocked there. Resets on every navigation so the number always reflects the current page.

▸ PER-SITE PAUSE — One toggle in the popup turns Marginalize off for the current site. Re-enable it just as fast.

What Marginalize is NOT:

• Not affiliated with uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus, Brave, Ghostery, or any other blocker.
• Not a "lite" Manifest V2 holdout. Built native for Manifest V3, with all the architecture trade-offs that implies.
• Not selling your data. Not sending telemetry. Not running analytics. Read the privacy policy — there is genuinely nothing leaving your browser other than scheduled filter-list fetches to public URLs you control.

Permissions:

Marginalize requests broad host access (<all_urls>) because the content scripts must run on every site you visit to apply cosmetic hiding and popunder defenses. It also requests declarativeNetRequest for ad blocking, storage for your settings and per-site preferences, alarms for the daily filter refresh, tabs and webNavigation for the per-tab counter, and declarativeNetRequestFeedback for the badge count. No telemetry, no analytics, no third-party servers, no data sale.

Made with care for the open web. Bug reports and filter-list suggestions welcome via the contact link on the listing.