Changelog

v1.5.0
  • Changed: Knockoff is Amazon-only again. Etsy checking is removed, and with it the site-access permission that feature needed. The extension now asks for nothing but storage for your own settings. Amazon filtering is unchanged.
  • Fixed: a review minimum now catches listings with no reviews at all. A listing with zero reviews could slip past a 100-review minimum, because a tile with no rating carries no review count to read.
  • Fixed: brands that start with an honorific are read in full. “Dr. Frederick’s Original” was read as the brand “Dr.” and scored as junk for having no vowels.
  • Fixed: with “Hide Alexa promos” on, the “Ask Alexa” pill in your order history is hidden too.
v1.4.0
  • New: the number of items Knockoff filtered now shows on the toolbar icon, the way an ad blocker does. The count is per tab, so it follows whatever you’re looking at.
  • New: two switches in Options > Display turn off the on-page interface. “Show the corner Knockoff button” hides the bottom-right button, and “Show the filtered count on the page” hides the corner pill. Both stay on by default. With both off, Knockoff still filters, the count still shows on the toolbar icon, and hidden items are still recoverable from the panel.
v1.3.1
  • Fixed: country flags rendered as boxed letters (“CN CN”) on Windows. The bundled flag font never loaded on Amazon pages, and macOS hid the problem behind its own flag glyphs.
  • Fixed: on an Etsy listing page, the panel could report a different shop’s age, saying “on Etsy about 17 years” for a shop that opened two months ago. The shop is now read from the listing’s own data instead of the first image on the page, which was sometimes a recommendation from another shop.
  • Fixed: trusting a brand now spares its product lines too. Trust “Jo Coffee” and a title like “SOME FUN JO: 24 Cups…” is no longer read as the pseudo-brand “SOME”. Blocking still needs the exact name.
  • Fixed: with “Hide Alexa promos” on, the “Ask Alexa” tooltip that Amazon pops over selected text is hidden too.
v1.3.0
  • New: Canadian alternatives on amazon.ca. Product pages there now get a “Find Canadian alternatives” button next to Buy Now, and the verdict menu gets “Shop Canadian alternatives”. It's the same feature amazon.com has had, pointed at Canada-based sellers instead. The claim is about who you buy from, not where a product is made. The button stays out of the way when the listing already ships from a Canada-based seller.
  • Fixed: connector standards like PCI-E, PCIe, PCI Express and NVMe are no longer read as brand names. Expansion cards and adapters often have no brand byline, so a title starting “PCI-E X1 to SATA 3.0 Controller Card” had the standard read as the brand. That was wrong either way it landed: trusted, it greenlit every no-name card on the marketplace; blocked, it hid a whole technology. Those listings now say Unbranded, which is what they are, and a real brand's own card is found behind the standard instead of being dimmed. Real brands with standard-like names, SATA GmbH and PCI Augsburg among them, are untouched.
v1.2.0
  • New: a “Hide Alexa promos” setting, off by default, in the in-page panel and options. Turn it on and Amazon's Alexa push goes away: the homepage banners, the “just ask Alexa” prompts on product pages, and the shopping-assistant sidebar (launched as Rufus, now Alexa-branded) that opens itself and squeezes the page into a narrow column. The page gets its full width back, and the panel never flashes into view while a page loads. Products that work with Alexa are untouched, and on layouts where Amazon renders your cart inside the assistant panel, the panel is left alone so your cart is never hidden.
v1.1.3
  • Fixed: books in recommendation carousels no longer get a “No brand” label. Knockoff already sits out the Books and Kindle Store departments, but the carousels on order and package-tracking pages have no department to read, so novels were being checked like products. Self-published titles have no publisher name to find, so they came back “No brand” and got dimmed. Books, audiobooks, music and films are now recognized on those pages too.
  • Fixed: listings on amazon.pl no longer get invented brand names. When Knockoff can't find a brand it falls back to the first word of the title, and it had everyday-word lists for French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch but never one for Polish, so ordinary product words like “Osłona” (cover) and “Przenośna” (portable) were read as brand names. Polish is now covered, including the way its adjectives change ending to agree with the noun.
  • Fixed: Amazon's own placeholder for a listing with no brand is no longer read as a real brand. Amazon writes “Generisch” or “Generico” into the brand field when a listing hasn't got one, and it stores that on the listing rather than per store, so a Polish shopper sees the German word. Read as a brand it was the most common brand on Amazon. Those listings now say Unbranded, which is what they are. Real brands with similar names, like Generic Comfort and Emart's “No Brand”, are untouched.
  • Fixed: “Sponsored” brand collection carousels now disappear when “Hide sponsored results” is on. They carry none of the ad labels the rest of Amazon's sponsored rows use, so they were the one sponsored strip that stayed on the page. Amazon's own “Featured from Amazon brands” tiles are still left alone.
  • Changed: Knockoff no longer sends its extension version with reports or feedback on any browser, and on Firefox it no longer contributes to the anonymous tally of how many search results Amazon sells itself. Firefox counts both as data collection you would have to opt into, and neither is worth asking for. Filtering is unchanged.
v1.1.2
  • New: an “Open the changelog after updates” setting, under Updates in options. Turn it on and Knockoff opens knockoff.co/changelog in a new tab whenever it updates, so you can see what changed. It stays off unless you turn it on.
  • Fixed: Knockoff no longer loads on Prime Video. The floating button could sit on top of the movie during windowed playback, and there is nothing on a video page to check anyway.
v1.1.1
  • Fixed: the “what's new” page no longer opens a second time. It was tracked by version number, so every release counted as a new announcement even when the page itself had not changed. It is now tracked by the announcement, so each one shows up once.
v1.1.0
  • Fixed: Amazon's add-to-cart size picker no longer gets filtered. Opening the picker re-renders the tile without its brand line, so Knockoff read real brands as “No brand” and dimmed the popup, or blanked it to an empty sheet if hiding was on. You already saw the verdict on the tile itself.
  • Fixed: with “Filter unrated listings” on, tiles on Today's Deals no longer all show “No ratings”. Deals cards carry no star row at all, so the filter caught every product on the page, Anker and Amazon's own Kindle included.
  • Fixed: listings that lead with a safety mark, like “ETL Listed Cable Matters …”, are no longer hidden. Knockoff read “ETL” as the brand instead of the real brand right behind it. Same for UL, CSA, FCC, CE and DLC.
  • Fixed: the “Check other shopping sites” switch no longer sticks on when your browser never shows the permission prompt. It now re-reads the real answer after ten seconds instead of waiting on a dialog that isn't coming.
  • Changed: Etsy listings no longer carry a note about AI-generated photos. A genuine maker uses AI photos as readily as a dropshipper does, so the note never told you whether a listing was what it claimed. The signals that do stand up are unchanged: catalog photo matches, shop age, sales pace, and where orders really ship from.
v1.0.1
  • Fixed: on Safari, turning on Etsy checking now works. The switch in settings did nothing, because Safari only asks for site access while you're on the site itself, from its own toolbar button. Knockoff now points you to Etsy and lets Safari ask there. Needs Safari 17 or later.
v1.0.0
  • New: Knockoff can now check Etsy listings. A listing claims a maker, and Knockoff reads that claim against the shop's own facts: its age, its sales pace, where orders really ship from, and whether the photos turn up on mass-market catalog listings. When the story doesn't hold up, the listing gets a tag in search results, and opening it shows why. Nothing is hidden or reordered, and a page with no tags means nothing looked off.
  • New: Amazon filtering now covers category browse pages and Amazon Outlet. Both list products in a layout Knockoff couldn't read, so nothing on them was ever checked. Outlet turned out to be the densest pseudo-brand surface we've measured.
  • New: a small Knockoff mark now sits in the bottom-right corner of every Amazon and Etsy page and opens the panel. Browsers hide extension buttons behind a toolbar menu by default, so this is the reliable way back in.
  • Everything else about Amazon filtering works the way it did.
v0.12.0
  • New: hide sellers by country. Pick countries in the in-page panel and Knockoff hides listings from sellers based there, right where the seller flags show. Only sellers Knockoff can identify are ever hidden. Unknown sellers are left alone, and you can undo it from the hidden listing or the panel.
  • New: pseudo-brands are now filtered inside Amazon's “Sponsored” brand carousels (the product-collection strips), not just regular search tiles.
  • Improved: the badge on low-rated listings now says what it caught (“Low rating”, “No ratings”, or “Few reviews”) instead of showing the brand name, which read as a call against the brand itself.
  • Improved: fewer good brands mistaken for junk. Listings that lead with generic words like “Accessories” or “Compatible” are no longer read as brand names.
  • Improved: seller flags now resolve for more sellers outside the US.
  • Improved: the “Find US alternatives” button now stays on flagged-junk brands even when they're sold by a US seller.
  • Fixed: shoes and other fashion listings on Amazon's mobile site no longer show “No brand”. The brand is now read from mobile-web cards.
v0.11.1
  • Improved: brand names in German, Polish, Czech, Turkish, and other marketplace languages are no longer mistaken for pseudo-brands. Knockoff now reads whether a name looks like a real word in the store's own language before judging it.
  • Improved: everyday product words on non-English Amazon stores, like the French “Lampe” (lamp), are no longer read as brand names on search tiles.
  • Improved: the “Find US alternatives” button now also appears on search-result tiles whose seller is confirmed to be outside the US, not just the listings Knockoff hid or dimmed.
v0.11.0
  • New: the “Find US alternatives” button now appears on search results too, not just product pages. It shows on the listings Knockoff hid, dimmed, or labeled, where you might want another option.
  • Improved: German brand names like Bergsteiger and Schwalbe are no longer mistaken for pseudo-brands. Consonant runs at compound-word seams read as normal German, not gibberish.
  • Improved: movie listings labeled “UHD 4K” or “4K-UHD” (common on European Amazon stores) are now recognized as films, not pseudo-brands.
  • Fixed: after an update, Knockoff now picks up the latest filtering fixes right away instead of running on the previous day's settings.
  • Fixed: the first-catch message no longer ends up underneath the filtered-count button.
v0.10.0
  • Improved: the control panel and options page got a cleaner, matching layout. Controls are grouped into labeled cards (Filtering, Ratings & reviews, Display) instead of one long list, with clearer icons and a noticeably shorter panel.
  • Improved: settings now save the moment you change them. The Save button is gone, replaced by a “Saved” confirmation, so a change you make in one place is no longer quietly reverted by an open settings page.
  • Improved: tapping a brand badge is now one simple choice: “Real brand” or “Junk.” Your answer updates your own trusted/blocked list right away and, at the same time, helps correct the shared community list. It replaces the older Trust / Block / report menu.
  • New: Knockoff now checks your Your Orders and order-details pages, marking name-squat brands on things you've already bought. It only labels (nothing is hidden) and stays quiet on real brands and media you own.
  • Improved: on iPhone and iPad, Knockoff now reads Amazon's mobile web pages properly. Product listings no longer show “No brand,” and the mobile homepage and mission pages get filtered like everywhere else.
  • Improved: movies, music, and other physical-media titles are no longer mistaken for pseudo-brands, including vinyl, CD, and Blu-ray deals on the Today's Deals pages, so fewer real listings get filtered.
  • Improved: the seller's country is identified on more listings. Knockoff now reads details on Amazon Business seller-profile pages, and falls back to the VAT number on European listings where Amazon publishes no business address.
  • Improved: the setting for showing a check on established brands was reworded to say what turning it on does, and a little-used “Flag established Chinese brands” toggle was removed; those brands still pass as established.
  • Fixed: listings on Best Sellers pages no longer show “No brand” after Amazon renamed the title element behind them.
  • Fixed: on desktop, the control panel now scrolls when it's taller than the window, so the footer links and version stay reachable at large font sizes or page zoom.
v0.9.0
  • New: a “Send feedback” form built into the control panel. Tell us about a brand we missed, a bug, or an idea in a couple of clicks. Leave an email if you'd like a reply, or don't. It sends your note and the address of the page you're on, and nothing else.
  • New: on iPhone and iPad, where Safari buries the toolbar button behind the “aA” menu, Knockoff now shows a small button in the bottom corner that opens its panel. The panel opens as a bottom sheet you can swipe away, with the filtered count and the show-hidden toggle inside it. The count pill that used to flicker while counting is fixed on desktop too.
  • Improved: the “Likely junk seller” warning on a product page is now a button. Click it to Trust, Block, or report the seller as legitimate, the same one-click controls you already have on brands.
  • Improved: Knockoff now sits out Amazon's grocery storefronts the way it already skips books and media, so everyday food staples aren't mistaken for pseudo-brands.
  • Improved: fewer false flags. Connector words at the start of a listing title, real brands on Amazon's eco-tagged recommendation tiles, and short all-caps seller initials are no longer mistaken for pseudo-brands.
  • Improved: the “Find US alternatives” button now appears only on amazon.com and only when “Help pick US alternatives” is on. It no longer showed up on other marketplaces or when the setting was off.
  • Windows: seller-origin flag chips now show real flags instead of the country code twice, like “US US”. Windows has no flag emoji, so Knockoff now bundles a small flag font.
v0.8.0
  • New: Knockoff now filters Amazon's Deals, Best Sellers, and New Releases pages, plus the “related items” carousels on product and home pages, not just search and browse results.
  • New: a “Find US alternatives” button on product pages opens a list of similar listings whose seller we can name, with US sellers flagged. It sends the products you open, so we build alternatives for what people actually want: the product, never who was looking. On by default; turn it off with “Help pick US alternatives” in settings.
  • Improved: the seller country chip is now clickable everywhere. A chip showing a country was a dead end; now every chip opens the seller's Amazon profile, where you can check the claim for yourself.
  • Improved: the community seller map now reads the whole business-identity block Amazon already publishes on a seller's profile page (registered name, address and contact details, disclosed there under marketplace-transparency laws). Only the seller's public details are contributed, never anything about you. Revisiting a seller page now refreshes their details, so a seller that moves gets noticed.
v0.7.2
  • Under-the-hood reliability and anti-abuse hardening for the community seller map.
v0.7.1
  • Fixed: the seller-map contribution stats could show a community total smaller than your own count (like “13 mapped / of the community's 1”). The two numbers now count the same thing, so the community total is never less than yours.
v0.7.0
  • New: listings now show a small country flag for where the seller is based, on the product image in search results and on the product page, so you can see a listing's origin at a glance. Flags are display-only and never change what Knockoff filters. On by default; turn them off in settings.
  • New: when Knockoff doesn't recognize a seller yet, it shows a “Where from?” chip. Opening the seller page adds their country to a community-built map that every install benefits from, and the countries you help map fill in a personal passport. Only seller IDs and countries are ever sent, never anything about you, your search, or the products.
v0.6.0
  • New: installing Knockoff now opens a quick welcome page that confirms it's on and lets you see it work on a live Amazon search, instead of dropping you into a settings form.
  • New: the first time Knockoff filters a search, a one-time toast confirms it's working and points out the toolbar button.
  • Changed: the Mac, iPhone, and iPad app icons now use the new red price-tag mark, matching the browser extension.
v0.5.1
  • Fixed: real brands are no longer dimmed on Amazon's newer search layout, where the brand sits on its own line above the product title (fixes Sony, SmallRig, and similar “[brand] [product]” searches).
  • Improved: Knockoff now adapts to Amazon layout changes without waiting for a store update, so filtering keeps working when Amazon reshuffles its page structure.
  • Changed: Knockoff's website has moved to knockoff.co.
v0.5.0
  • New: Knockoff now runs on Firefox for Android.
  • New: filter by minimum star rating and review count, so poorly-rated or barely-reviewed listings drop out alongside pseudo-brands.
  • New: when you report a misclassification, you can now name the brand you expected, so corrections land faster.
  • New: pseudo-brands are now filtered on Amazon's “Keep shopping for” recommendation grids, not just the main search results.
  • Improved: Knockoff now reads the brand from Amazon's dedicated byline, not just the product title, for more accurate detection.
  • Improved: certification and compatibility brackets at the start of a title (like “[FCC Certified]”) are no longer mistaken for the brand.
  • Improved: allowlisted brands are now recognized even when buried inside category-page titles.
  • Improved: fewer false flags: short vowelless acronyms like CCT and RGB read as unbranded, and accented words like German compounds are no longer misread as pseudo-brands.
  • Improved: expanded the built-in brand lists so more real brands are recognized on sight.
  • Improved: more media titles (books, music, movies) are skipped on all-departments searches.
  • Changed: dimmed listings now stay dimmed when you hover; only an explicit un-hide reveals them.
  • Changed: refreshed app icon and in-app logo with the new red price-tag brand mark.
v0.4.0
  • New: the control panel now lists every brand it filtered on the current search, each with one-click buttons to allow or block it.
  • New: back up and restore your settings (filter level, allow and block lists, and preferences) as a JSON file from the options page.
  • New: on product pages, Knockoff now warns when the seller's name looks like a trademark-squat pseudo-brand.
  • New: the settings page opens automatically the first time you install Knockoff.
  • Improved: category words you search for are no longer dimmed by the detection heuristics.
  • Fixed: Bibles are no longer flagged on all-departments searches.
v0.3.0
  • New: media and digital categories (Books, Kindle, Audible, music, movies, apps) are now skipped entirely: titles there are works, not brand names, so nothing gets wrongly filtered.
  • New: the options page now includes the core filter controls (filter level, action, and related settings), so you can adjust Knockoff without opening an Amazon page.
  • New: refresh the community brand list on demand from the options page instead of waiting for the daily update.
  • Improved: the “hide Sponsored listings” option now also removes sponsored widget carousels and works on non-English marketplaces.
  • Improved: brand detection: model numbers (like CR2032), metric fastener sizes (like M6), and generic words like “Heat” are no longer mistaken for brands; fewer false flags on real golf brands; and unlisted brands that name-drop Apple or Samsung hardware are now caught.
  • Fixed: control-panel menus now close when you click outside them.
  • Mac: now supports macOS 11 Big Sur and later (previously required a much newer macOS).
v0.2.0
  • New: works on every Amazon marketplace (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, and more) with locale-aware brand detection. Previously only .com, .ca, .co.uk, and .com.au.
  • New: optional toggle to hide Amazon “Sponsored” listings, in the Knockoff control panel. Off by default; leaves organic results (and Amazon's own “Featured from Amazon brands” tiles) untouched.
  • Changed: filtered listings are now dimmed by default instead of hidden, so you can see what Knockoff caught. Prefer them gone? Switch the action to Hide in the control panel.
v0.1.0
  • Initial release. Filters trademark-squat pseudo-brands out of Amazon search results with hide / dim / label actions, three filter levels (Relaxed, Standard, Strict), personal allow/block lists, and one-click misclassification reporting. Runs locally; the only network request is a daily brand-list refresh. Works on amazon.com, .ca, .co.uk, and .com.au.