标签：#extensions

What launched Stashr started as an invite-only waitlist, then opened up as a free public beta . Today it leaves beta for good. That means three things: It's a finished product, not a preview. Everything the beta promised as "coming next" is live: AI tagging, meaning-based search across your media, and a full agent stack. Nothing on this page is a maybe. Pricing is real. Stashr is now a paid app with a 7-day free trial and no permanent free tier. More on the plans below. It's stable. Thousands of saves, big bulk imports, deleted-post edge cases, and the weird stuff you all threw at it during beta are handled. Thank you for breaking it. It's much sturdier for it. If you're new here, the fastest way in is to [create an account(/signup), install the browser extension , and keep saving the way you already do. What Stashr actually is In one line: it's a capture-first bookmark manager. The moment you save something on any platform, Stashr copies the full post into a private library that's genuinely yours, then tags it and makes it searchable in plain English. That "copy" part is the whole point. A normal bookmark is just a pointer at someone else's servers. The day the author deletes the post, goes private, or gets suspended, your save resolves to nothing. Stashr keeps a real copy, so what you saved is still there months later even when the original is gone. If you've ever wondered where your saved posts actually go or watched your links quietly rot into 404s , that's the gap this closes. It works in three moves: Capture A browser extension watches for saves on the platforms you already use. Bookmark on X , favorite on TikTok , save on Reddit , tap the ribbon on Instagram , exactly as you always have, and the full post lands in Stashr automatically. You don't change a single habit. A bulk import pulls in the backlog you already built too. Organize Every save is read and auto-tagged by AI on the way in, so the filing happens for you. No folders to babysit, no tagging discip

After I published my last article about building a Chrome extension that speaks browser notifications aloud, a commenter asked a question I didn't have a good answer to. He pointed out that a lot of web apps — Slack, Gmail, most modern tools — fire their notifications from a service worker via registration.showNotification() , not from the page's JavaScript context. My MAIN world override of window.Notification would never reach those. He was right. And I told him I'd look into it. I spent a week researching whether there was any way to close that gap. There isn't. But the reason why is more interesting than a simple "no." Two ways a website can show you a notification When a website sends you a browser notification, it can do it in one of two ways. The first is the constructor path. The page's own JavaScript calls new Notification("You have a message") directly. This is common for in-tab alerts, real-time updates when you're actively on the site, or any notification triggered by something you just did. The second is the push path. The browser receives a push event from the website's server, wakes up the website's service worker in the background, and the service worker calls self.registration.showNotification() from inside its own scope. This is what happens when Slack notifies you of a new message while the tab is closed or backgrounded. The page never runs. No page JavaScript ever fires. My extension catches the first path. The MAIN world content script overrides window.Notification before any page code runs. But the service worker never touches the page's window. It has no window . It runs in a completely isolated thread, completely separate from the page, and calls showNotification on itself. The override is never reached. Why can't the extension reach the service worker? This is the part that took me a week to fully accept. Chrome extensions can inject content scripts into web pages. They can run code in the MAIN world or the ISOLATED world of a page. They can

We have all been there: you open your editor to write a simple feature, and within ten minutes, your screen is a chaotic mess. You are drowning in squiggly red lines, bright rainbow bracket lines, a crowded sidebar, Git blame popups blocking your text, and terminal notifications screaming for attention. Modern IDEs like VS Code and Cursor are incredibly powerful, but out of the box, they are built to distract you. If you want to achieve true flow state, you need to strip away the noise. Here are 10 minimalist extensions built for both VS Code and Cursor that are explicitly engineered to eliminate clutter, reduce cognitive load, and help you focus on the only thing that matters: the code. Interface and Zen Mode Cleansers 1. Zen Mode (Built-in, but needs tweaking) The Vibe: Complete visual isolation. What it does: While not an external extension, true minimalism starts here. Hitting Cmd+K Z (or Ctrl+K Z) instantly hides the activity bar, status bar, sidebar, and editor tabs, leaving you with nothing but your code centered on the screen. The Focus Trick: Go into your settings and toggle zenMode.hideLineNumbers to true to get rid of the left-hand numbering margin entirely for deep reading sessions. 2. APC Customize UI++ The Vibe: Pixel-perfect control over editor bloat. What it does: If you love the layout of hyper-minimalist editors like Zed but want to keep the power of Cursor or VS Code, this is your holy grail. It allows you to shrink font sizes of the UI independently from your code, hide specific layout borders, trim the massive top title bars, and customize panel padding to give your code room to breathe. 3. Customize UI / Active Bar Hidden The Vibe: Moving target elements out of sight. What it does: The left-hand Activity Bar (with the extensions, search, and source control icons) is a constant source of colorful badge notifications. Use this to hide it entirely. You can easily trigger those panels via keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+Shift+E for explorer, Cmd+Shift+F fo

TL;DR: Most extensions block Google's AI Overviews by hiding the panel with a content script after it renders — fragile, flickery, and always a step behind Google's markup changes. A better approach: force udm=14 at the network layer with declarativeNetRequest , so the AI Overview never loads. The content script becomes a backstop, not the main mechanism. One Chrome API mystery — AI Mode being invisible to four different extension APIs — shows why the DOM was never the right layer. Google puts an AI Overview at the top of most search results now, and a lot of people would rather it didn't. So there's a whole shelf of Chrome extensions that remove it. Almost all of them work the same way, and I think that way is a mistake. The obvious approach, and why it's a trap The default move is DOM-hiding: inject a content script, wait for the AI Overview panel to render, find it by class name or attribute, and set display: none . It's the first thing anyone reaches for, and it works — until it doesn't. The problems are all baked into the approach. You're reacting after the render, so there's a flash of AI content before your script catches it. You're matching against Google's markup, which is obfuscated and reshuffled constantly, so every layout change is a silent breakage. And you're paying for DOM churn on a page you don't control. You end up in a permanent game of catch-up against a page that changes whenever Google feels like it. The deeper issue is that you're operating one layer too high. The panel is a symptom . By the time it's in the DOM, the work is already done — the server decided to send it, the page rendered it, and now you're scrambling to un-render it. If you can move the decision earlier, none of that scramble has to happen. The thesis: prevent it at the network layer Google Search takes a parameter, udm , that selects which result vertical you get. udm=14 is the plain "Web" results view — the classic list of links, no AI Overview, no AI Mode. It's Google's ow

You submitted your extension, waited days for review, and got back a rejection with a violation called "Purple Potassium." Your extension looks fine to you, so what does it even mean? Here is what it is, why it happens, and how to catch it before you ever hit submit. What "Purple Potassium" actually means "Purple Potassium" is Google's internal tag for excessive or unused permissions . Your manifest requests access to something your code does not actually use, and the reviewer flags it. It is one of the most common reasons a Chrome extension gets rejected, and it is frustrating precisely because the extension works fine in testing. Review is checking something testing never does: whether every permission you ask for is justified by your code. The usual causes 1. API permissions you declared but never call. You added tabs , bookmarks , or cookies to your manifest at some point, but there is no chrome.bookmarks.* call anywhere in your code. 2. Host access that is too broad. You requested <all_urls> when your extension only touches one site: // Flagged "host_permissions" : [ "<all_urls>" ] // Better "host_permissions" : [ "https://*.example.com/*" ] Leftover permissions after removing a feature. You shipped a feature that needed downloads, later removed the feature, and forgot to remove the permission. The tabs misunderstanding. The tabs permission does not grant access to the tabs API. Basic methods like chrome.tabs.create() work without it. It only grants four sensitive Tab properties: url, pendingUrl, title, and favIconUrl. If you declare tabs but never read those, it counts as unused. How to fix it by hand List everything in permissions, optional_permissions, and host_permissions. For each one, search your code for the matching chrome. call. Remove any permission with no usage. Narrow and other broad patterns to the specific hosts you need. In your reviewer notes, write one plain sentence per sensitive permission explaining why you need it. Reviewers often lack con

The problem I kept running into I'm a chronic tab hoarder. At any given time I've got 40–80 tabs open across two windows. Chrome's built-in Memory Saver is aggressive in the wrong ways — it hibernates tabs I'm actively referencing. And the built-in task manager is a two-step detour that still doesn't tell me which tabs I should actually close. So I built Tab Memory Manager. What it does Per-tab memory estimates — A live MB count next to every open tab. Sorted by memory usage by default. There's a live total on the toolbar icon so you always know what Chrome is consuming right now. Smart suggestions — The extension flags your biggest, stalest tabs: ones that are idle the longest and consuming the most. It never suggests your active tab, pinned tabs, tabs playing audio, or domains you've whitelisted. Hibernate, don't close — This was the core design decision. Hibernating frees the memory but keeps the tab alive in your strip — it reloads when you click it. Much safer than closing, especially mid-research. Bulk cleanup — Select multiple tabs or hit Apply on the suggestions panel. See the total memory you'll reclaim before you commit. Undo list — Closed something by mistake? There's a "Recently cleaned" panel. One click to restore. Tab grouping — Groups all your open tabs by domain into color-coded Chrome tab groups, instantly. The interesting technical bit: memory estimates Chrome's stable extension API doesn't expose exact per-tab memory. The chrome.processes API that does exists only on Dev and Canary builds — not the Chrome that 99% of people use. So Tab Memory Manager uses calibrated estimates based on tab state, domain patterns, and known Chrome process overhead. These are clearly labeled "est." in the UI. If you're on Dev or Canary, you can switch on real per-tab memory in settings. The warning Chrome shows about "processes requires dev channel" is a Chrome-generated note about that optional API — the extension works completely normally without it. It's not a bug

Hey tech family! 👋 If you’ve noticed your favorite Chrome extensions acting a bit differently lately or if you're a developer currently sweating over a massive codebase rewrite you are experiencing the era of Manifest V3 (MV3) . 🤖 Google has officially pushed the web ecosystem forward by deprecating Manifest V2, making MV3 the absolute standard for how browser extensions behave. But why is this happening, what actually changed, and why is the internet so divided over it? Let’s break it all down in plain English! 👇 🧐 What Exactly is Manifest V3? Think of a "Manifest" as the blueprint file ( manifest.json ) that tells the browser exactly what an extension is, what files it uses, and what permissions it needs to run. Manifest V3 is Google's major architectural overhaul of this system. Its core mission sounds great on paper: improve user privacy, beef up security, and boost browser performance . However, achieving those goals meant rewriting the core rules of how extensions interact with your browser. 🛠️ The Biggest Changes & New Features MV3 isn't just a small patch; it fundamentally alters the underlying extension engine. Here are the headline shifts: Goodbye Background Pages, Hello Service Workers! 💤 In MV2, extensions used hidden, persistent background pages that ran 24/7, hogging your computer's RAM even when you weren't using them. MV3 replaces these with Service Workers. They are event-driven meaning they wake up, execute a task (like clicking an extension icon), and go right back to sleep. Hello, free RAM! 🐏 The Ad-Blocker Shakeup: webRequest vs. declarativeNetRequest 🛑 This is the most controversial change. In MV2, powerful extensions like uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept, read, and block network requests in real-time using complex code. MV3 replaces the blocking version of this with declarativeNetRequest . Instead of letting the extension intercept the data, the extension must now hand Chrome a pre-defined list of rules, and Chrome does the b