Notes Not Ads

Most ad blockers leave holes. Notes Not Ads fills them. It blocks common ad and tracker requests using Chrome's Manifest V3 rules, finds the ad and clutter containers left in the page, and then does something with that space instead of leaving a gap: it puts a sentence you wrote there. Not a feed, not a quote of the day, not a widget — one intention, in the space that used to sell you something. OR NOTHING AT ALL Empty your notes and there is nothing to draw, so every detected surface is removed and the page closes over it. Blocking stays on either way. WHAT IT WILL NOT TOUCH Breaking a page is worse than missing an ad, so the detection is deliberately conservative. It stays away from banking, brokerage, payment, and password-manager sites; from checkout, cart, billing, login, and password pages; and from any page showing a password field. Inside a page it will not replace navigation, headers, footers, forms, comments, article bodies, text editors, or dropdown menus. The tools you work in are left alone too. On product and app surfaces — mail, documents, file storage, design tools, developer and cloud dashboards, team chat, and the other software you sign in to — the network blocking stays on and page replacement is switched off entirely. These places do not sell you ads, so anything replaced there would be a mistake. The exclusion list ships inside the extension and grows whenever a false positive is reported. YouTube gets a purpose-built layer instead. This includes creative tools such as ElevenLabs, Krea, Runway, Suno and Descript. GDBrowser profiles and icon tools are also protected from page replacement. Network blocking stays on for these sites. Search engines are left alone as well. An ad there answers something you searched for, and its "Sponsored" label is what tells you it is an ad, so it stays visible and labelled. Network blocking stays on. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION, NOT BY POLICY • No accounts. • No analytics. • No telemetry. • No remote rule service and no remotely hosted code. • No data reaches the developer, because nothing is ever sent. Settings live in Chrome's local extension storage. The built-in report tools — "report a missed ad" and "report a wrongly replaced page" — write a report locally and copy it to your clipboard. Nothing is uploaded. Each can also open the GitHub issue form in a new tab, but that link carries nothing about your page: your report reaches GitHub only if you paste it in and submit it. The page address in a report is cut back to origin plus path first, and the page title is left out. HONEST LIMITS This is not a full filtering engine and does not try to be. Network blocking is a fixed, packaged rule set, and it never intercepts a request. On YouTube and nowhere else, the extension also edits the video player's own response inside the page to drop ad payloads before the player reads them; requests still leave your browser unchanged and nothing is sent anywhere. Cosmetic filtering supports a subset of standard filter syntax and skips procedural filters, scriptlets, and anti-adblock countermeasures. It is tested against large global ad-heavy publishers; on smaller or regional sites expect to see more get through. When something is missed, the report tool is how it gets fixed. Some video players are built to wait for an ad and do not recover when the ad is blocked. Where that happens the video may not start. The extension does not serve you an ad to work around it. You can switch the extension off globally or for one site at a time. Open source, GPLv3.