r/chrome_extensions

I realized an annoying part of browsing is choosing a link from Google Search, then realising after opening it that it's

• a 20-minute deep dive
• a paywalled
• an unexpected image-heavy tutorial
• or unexpected dense technical documentation

I built a lightweight Chrome extension that adds small “preview signals” beside Google Search results before you click.

It currently shows:
• estimated read time
• paywall detection
• image-heavy pages
• code-heavy pages

The goal was to reduce wasted clicks and help evaluate links faster while browsing. If you'd like to try out the extension its called LinkFlags - Preview Signals Before Opening Links from the Chrome Web Store :)

Hope this helps and also would like your thoughts/feedback on this too!

I’ve developed dozens of extensions, submitted nearly 20 to the app store, and while some have gained a massive user base, most have been run-of-the-mill. I’ve integrated payment systems into some of them, but essentially none of my extensions have earned a single dollar (because I didn’t implement paid features).

This post isn’t about sharing extension statistics; rather, I want to discuss an often-overlooked but crucial issue: mental preparation.

We’re now in the AI era. With development tools like Vibe Coding, we can bring our ideas to life faster than ever before. Web apps and all kinds of applications are easy to build. But finding your product-market fit (PMF) is still no walk in the park. You need to promote your product, you need to market it, you need to reach your target users, and you need to identify the problems they face—not just develop in isolation. It’s a long process, and not all developers are comfortable taking that step.

Before seeing results, you’ll be bombarded with stories about how much money “X” made or how “Y” achieved massive growth. Many people get distracted by this information, feeling that what they’re doing is meaningless. They spend time and tokens on these projects every day, yet they don’t generate any revenue—and they end up resenting them!

If you’re feeling this way too, I’d like to share my perspective with you. Neither you nor your product is at fault. A lack of revenue doesn’t mean a lack of progress. As long as you keep building, your gains will manifest in your next product. And no one else can gather these gains for you—they’re stored in your subconscious. In other words, you’re quietly getting stronger. You simply haven’t seen results yet, and the only reason is that you haven’t found the door that’s meant for you. You already hold the key—and it wasn’t created for no reason. If you build and search less, it will naturally take more time to find that door. But if you build and search more, your chances of finding it increase exponentially.

You’re smart—you’ve probably figured it out. “Searching” means promotion and marketing, posting content, and launching your app on app stores to reach your target audience everywhere.

I understand you might feel frustrated or even resentful during this process. But you can definitely push through—fill up your tank after five minutes and go full throttle!

This is my personal journey. I’d love to hear about the challenges you’ve faced during development and how you’ve overcome them. It will be helpful for you and for everyone else.

I want to be upfront. I am not a developer. I have never written code professionally. I run a beard oil brand in Korea and had zero technical background going into this.

But I had a problem I wanted to solve.

Every time I used Claude or ChatGPT my results were mediocre compared to what I kept seeing others post online. I was typing conversationally, basically just chatting and hoping something useful came back. My prompts were not improving and I had no idea why.

I looked at existing prompt tools and they all did the same thing. Rewrite your prompt. Hand it back. No explanation. You copy the result, use it once, and learn absolutely nothing.

So I decided to build something different. Something that actually teaches you why your prompt was weak and why the fix works.

I called it Seuseung (스승), Korean for revered master or mentor.

What it does:

It lives inside Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. No tab switching, no copy paste. You type your prompt, click a button, and a panel slides in from the side with a score across Clarity, Context and Specificity, a diagnosis of what is weak, an improved version optimized for whichever AI you are using, and most importantly a teaching section that explains the real reason each change makes the AI respond better. Plus 3 principles you can carry forward to every future prompt.

The teaching part is the whole point. Every other tool just fixes the prompt. This one tries to make you better at prompting so you need the tool less over time.

How I built it:

Entirely with Claude's help. Every line of code, every debugging session, every deployment issue. I had no idea what a proxy server was when I started. I did not know what CORS meant. I had never touched Node.js or Chrome extension APIs.

It took longer than a developer would take. There were a lot of errors and a lot of going back and forth. But it shipped.

The stack if anyone is curious: Chrome extension with content scripts injected into Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, a Node.js proxy on Railway that handles the Anthropic API calls and usage tracking, Polar for payments, GitHub Pages for the privacy policy.

Free to try: 10 lessons per day

Pro: unlimited at $4/month or $29/year

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/스승-·-seuseung/kgblidfbdjmfehfphgjfmbieigocejni

Happy to answer questions about the build process or the product. Especially from anyone else without a technical background thinking about building something.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I've been working on called Glia. It is a 100% offline, local-first RAG and memory layer designed to connect your AI web chats (Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek) with your local developer tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) using a unified local database.

I wanted something lightweight that did not require pulling heavy Docker containers or subscribing to third-party memory APIs. I settled on a Node.js + SQLite architecture running sqlite-vec (for 768-dim float32 embeddings) alongside SQLite FTS5 for hybrid search, powered completely by local Ollama instances.

We just launched a live website that outlines the details and demonstrates the features in action:

• Website: https://glia-ai.vercel.app/
• Codebase: https://github.com/Eshaan-Nair/Glia-AI

Technical Stack & Features:

• Hybrid Search Retrieval: SQLite-vec (using nomic-embed-text locally) + FTS5 keyword prefix matching (porter stemmer).
• Surgical Sentence-level Trimming: Chunks are sliced into sentences. When a prompt is intercepted, only the exact matching sentences are pulled out of the vector store instead of the whole paragraph. It cuts LLM prompt bloat by ~90-95% in my benchmarks.
• Knowledge Graph Extraction: An offline task queue uses a local LLM (llama3.1:8b via Ollama) to extract entity triples (subject-relation-object). These are stored in a SQLite facts table (or Neo4j if you run the full Docker compose profile) and fused with the vector retrieval score.
• HyDE (Hypothetical Document Embeddings): Queries are pre-processed to generate a hypothetical answer, which is embedded together with the original query to bridge semantic gaps.
• Concurrency: Running SQLite in WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) mode allows the browser extension dashboard and active MCP sessions to read/write concurrently without locking.
• PII Redaction: Aggressive scrubbing of JWTs, API keys, emails, and IPs in the extension before data is saved.

The extension works on Claude.ai, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, and Mistral. The MCP server runs out of the same backend database for your terminal agent or Cursor.

You can set it up with a single command: npx glia-ai-setup

Glia is completely open-source (MIT). If you like the local-first approach or want to contribute to the SQLite vector pipeline, PRs are very welcome, and a star on GitHub helps the project get discovered!

I would appreciate any feedback on the SQLite hybrid search scaling, the scoring fusion algorithm (RAG pipeline details are in RAG_PIPELINE.md), or local graph extraction performance!

The idea came from a simple problem : I watch a lot of YouTube tutorials and every time I have a question I have to scrub through the whole video to find the answer. It was killing me.

So I built YouShort. It's a Chrome extension that sits next to the video. You type your question, it answers and tells you exactly where in the video the info is.

Did a collab with an Instagram page a week ago, 200 downloads since then which I didn't expect at all.

Dropped the link in the comments if anyone's curious.

I made Grok but for Reddit: Link

I'm always looking to get my typing speed up but the existing typing test sites felt useless past a point (you know the drill - same stock paragraphs on loop, no variety) . Wanted to practice on real prose, blog posts, Wikipedia articles, whatever I was already reading. App built fully with Claude code on Perplexity Computer. Feel free to flag any bugs you spot in the comments. Thanks!

Check out the repo here, installation steps included

Built something I wish existed — Zroppix.

Amazon makes 2.5 million price changes per day and deliberately hides that history from you. Most people shop blind — no idea if today's price is a deal or near the all-time high.

Zroppix fixes that. Open any Amazon product, click the icon, get an instant BUY or WAIT verdict in 5 seconds based on 90 days of real price history.

What it shows you:
→ BUY or WAIT — one clear answer, no chart reading
→ 90-day lowest, average, and highest price
→ What % of buyers paid less than today's price
→ Email alert when price drops to your target

Free to install. No account needed. Works on Chrome and Brave.

Chrome Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/zroppix/imklniieijfelodlaepelbkacbelmcnf

Would love honest feedback from this community — what would make it more useful?

A few months ago I built Voxfile — a Chrome extension I was genuinely excited about. Spent weeks on it. Finally packaged it up and submitted to the Chrome Web Store.

Then the waiting game started.

Day 5 — rejection email. Reason: manifest.json permissions were too broad. Fair enough, I fixed it and resubmitted.

Day 11 — another rejection. This time the store listing description length was out of compliance. I didn't even know there were character rules. Fixed, resubmitted.

Day 17 — rejected again. Different description issue this time, in the actual listing copy on the developer dashboard.

17 days. Three rejections. Each one for something a static check could have caught in 30 seconds before I ever hit submit.

And the worst part wasn't the time — it was what happened to my motivation. By day 17 I barely cared about Voxfile anymore. That submission cycle quietly killed the momentum I'd built over weeks of actual work.

I'm pretty sure this is not a unique story.

So I built ExtGuard — a pre-submission validator for Chrome extensions. You drop your .zip into the browser, it runs 25 policy checks locally (your code never leaves your machine), and in ~30 seconds you get a report showing exactly what Google's review system would reject you for — with the specific policy reference and a fix recommendation.

It catches the things that burned me:

• Manifest V3 compliance
• Permission scope issues (<all_urls> when you only need one domain, etc.)
• eval() / new Function() calls buried in minified code
• Inline scripts violating CSP
• Privacy policy URL missing or pointing to the wrong page
• Description length and quality issues
• Icon sizes not physically present in the zip
• ...and 18 more checks

The scan engine is 100% client-side (nothing leaves your browser). I made that call specifically because I'd never upload my unreleased extension source to a random SaaS — so I didn't build one that asks you to.

Free tier: 5 Scans in total, 25 core checks. Pro ($9/mo): unlimited scans, all 25+ checks, line-level code context, PDF reports, CI/CD API. There's also a $4.99 one-time scan if you just want to check before launch with no subscription.

If this could've saved even one person's 17 days, it's worth posting. Would genuinely love feedback from this community — you're exactly the people who know where the gaps are.
https://www.extguard.online/

heyyyyy 3 weeks ago i almost sent a passive-aggressive "ok cool" to my Boss at 11pm. caught myself in time. realized this happens to me like weekly so i built a thing for it.

it's called cooldown. when you hit post/send/tweet, a small modal pops up with a countdown (10s by default). you can cancel or send anyway. that's it.

the part i actually like about it: it doesn't trigger on every message. that would be insanely annoying. it only kicks in when the message is:

- long

- in all caps

- has a "trigger word" you defined (mine are "really", "hate", "quit")

- or just at night (auto night mode between 10pm-5am)

short stuff like "ok" or "lol" passes through silently. you forget the extension exists 90% of the time.

works on twitter/x and reddit. nothing else for now. linkedin was on my list but their composer is in an iframe and it was a pain so i dropped it.

100% local, no backend, no account. ~30kb total.

couple of things i'd love feedback on:

1. does the "smart mode" thing make sense to you or would you actually want a delay on every message?

2. besides reddit and twitter where do you regret-send the most? trying to figure what to add next

happy to answer anything about the build

I always found myself searching on Google, then opening YouTube separately for a quick video explanation.

Also, the right side of Google Search is usually just empty space.

So I built SearchShorts — a Chrome extension that adds relevant Shorts beside your Google results ⚡

You can switch tabs, drag it around, resize the UI, and save videos locally.

Live on Chrome Web Store and free:

🔗 Get SearchShorts on Chrome Web Store

Preview any link instantly. Available in Chrome Web Store

I thought it was about time I created the website for my extension and I used claude for this. I was just wondering if it looks like its created by AI bc people seem to hate that

Hey everyone,

Wanted to share something I've been building for the past few months. It's a Chrome extension called Remarkify.

The problem I kept running into: whenever I found an interesting article online and wanted to read it on my reMarkable, the only real option was saving it as a PDF. And PDF works, but it always bothered me. I can't erase and re-annotate freely the way I do with actual notes. It feels unnatural to have static content in a notebook.

So I thought, what if the text just became real strokes on the page? Like it was always meant to be there?

That's what Remarkify does. You select any text on a webpage, right click -> Send to Remarkable, and it converts it into native reMarkable notes. The text adapts to your tablet's width and shows up like a proper document, fully editable and erasable. Every reMarkable model is supported.

Setup is quick. If you want to customize things, you can go to your account on the website and adjust pen type, page type, font, color, and size. You do need your reMarkable Cloud account connected for it to work.

I made it freemium to cover the service costs of running everything, with a free tier to try it out.

It's in early stages so bugs are likely, but it's been working well for my own use. I honestly don't know if this pain point is common or just a me thing, so I'd love to hear from you. What do you wish you could do with web content on your reMarkable that you currently can't?

iOS application/Safari Extension and some AI involvement is on my roadmap.

Website: remarkify.app
Chrome Web Store: Remarkify