From the first cleanup to the researched wave — what changed, what broke, and what got fixed, taken from the project's own release notes.
v1.17.0
Current releaseThe researched waveMika & Haru — anime focus buddies
Pick your guide in onboarding; they float on every site with a live site clock and an emotion face driven by the site's score. 8 emotions × 4 poses × 2 characters, hand-authored parametric SVG (~16 KB).
Watch Intent
An implementation-intention prompt on watch pages — state your purpose and planned minutes. The dashboard gains an Intent Match rate.
Streak Insurance
Freezes are earned, never bought: close all rings 4+ days in a week to bank a freeze that absorbs a missed day. Repair a broken chain by doubling your Focused goal the next day. The ledger is derived from history, so it can't drift or be forged.
Adaptive Ring Goals
Monday's briefing compares your 4-week trend against each goal and suggests one calibration step up or down — you apply or keep.
Graduated Unblock Friction
One-click unblocks become a ladder: state a reason (≥12 chars) → a 10–30s pause that grows with each unblock today → a quiz on Strict or after 3+ unblocks.
Weekly Recap Card & Accountability Pairing
Export your ring week as a branded PNG (100% canvas, local). Trade pair cards with a partner by copy/paste — only ring counts leave your device, checksum-tamper-evident, no server.
Sleep Guard
An evening YouTube block (default 22:30–07:00) plus a wind-down briefing opened 30 minutes before it starts — once per day.
Vim-style keys (opt-in)
j/k scroll, gg/G, f, t — and the exit keys are first-class: Esc goes back, x closes the tab, ? shows help.
v1.8.5
September 3, 2026Real dated dashboard history
Daily website usage now appears in every Day/Week/Month point. The 30-day heatmap reflects recorded browsing time, and each cell knows its exact local date.
Historical top sites
The Top Sites card follows the active range — today, the current week, or the last 30 days.
Calendar-month activity
Monthly Activity always starts on the 1st and ends today, adapting to 28–31 day months.
v1.8.4
August 30, 2026Local-first file sync
Activity and safe preferences are recorded in chrome.storage.local even when no file is connected, shown as “Saved locally”, and merged on reconnect.
Portable profile & focus settings
The shared file now carries display name, avatar, goal, blocked topics, channels, Smart Lists and Pomodoro preferences — with per-section timestamps.
Sensitive data excluded from sync
API keys, passwords, emails, browser/session state, file handles and runtime timer state are explicitly excluded from the portable JSON file.
v1.8.3
August 22, 2026Watch Time & Topics panel
A range-aware dashboard section with total tracked watch time beside a Top Topics breakdown, captured from hashtag chips, title hashtags and video categories — counted once per video, stored per day, rendered with proportional bars.
v1.8.2
August 22, 2026Near-real-time file sync
The background watches data changes and pushes to the shared JSON file ~10s after any mutation. The sync badge shows the last write time and file size.
v1.8.0
August 21, 2026Design System v2 — “Graphite & Iris”
A full visual overhaul: warm graphite dark base, one iris-amber brand accent, muted semantic colors, hairline borders, soft realistic shadows, standard-eased motion and reduced-motion support across every surface.
Dashboard UX rework
Segmented Day/Week/Month control with ARIA tabs, a 7-day context chart for the Day view, daily-limit usage on Top Sites, and a version footer read from the manifest.
Brave + manual Import/Export flow
Detects Brave and explains how to enable the File System Access API; Import now distinguishes empty files, invalid JSON and non-FocusTube JSON.
Streaks no longer reset unfairly
A day with no activity yet no longer zeroes the streak — it carries over until the day actually ends with no actions.
v1.7.0
August 21, 2026Cross-browser local file sync
Share one JSON data file on disk between every browser running FocusTube — including Dropbox/OneDrive folders for cross-machine sharing — via a periodic read → union-merge → write cycle.
Timezone-accurate day keys
Metrics were stored under UTC day keys while the dashboard grouped by local days — all day keys are now local-time based.
Time tracking accuracy
Fixed a ~30–60× undercount caused by Chrome's 30s alarm minimum; ticks now accumulate real elapsed time.
v1.2.0
The systems releaseUnified Liquid Glass design system
One token system shared by popup, dashboard, content UI and the block page.
Focus Score & Dashboard v2
A 0–100 score, GitHub-style heatmap, streak counter and lifetime metrics.
Pomodoro, Smart Lists, AI Nudge, Tab Manager
Pomodoro timer, category Smart Lists, AI nudge cards with a 3-breath animation, and a tab manager with workspaces and grouping.
v1.1.0
April 16, 2026Universal site blocker
Block any website for specific time periods, with subdomain-aware matching and a beautiful block page.
Comprehensive documentation
A docs/ folder with architecture, API and structure guides, plus a professional folder reorganization.
v1.0.1
Hardening release20 issues triaged and fixed
HTML-escaped AI summary output and keyword overlays, DOM-built avatar and blocks lists, validated message payloads, redacted API keys in logs, tightened web_accessible_resources, and more — see SECURITY.md.
Performance passes
Replaced whole-document MutationObserver with yt-navigate-finish, slowed ad-skip polling to 250ms, and removed the 10-second maintenance interval.
v1.0.0
April 15, 2026Initial releaseYouTube optimization suite
Hide ads and Shorts, block distracting channels and keywords, auto-skip ads, force highest quality, auto-pause on inactivity, hide comments and info cards.
Focus features
YouTube time blocking, scheduled blocking, quiz protection on disable, a focus dashboard and AI video summaries.