Devs Building Tools to Fix Browser Chaos
Developers are experiencing frustration with browser workflows, including tab management, privacy concerns during screen sharing, repetitive tasks, and a lack of readily available tools for common development needs. They are building Chrome extensions to address these issues, often driven by personal need and a desire for better control and efficiency. This highlights a gap in existing browser functionality and automation solutions.
SOURCES (60)
“Hi, i am looking for alpha/beta testers for my lightweight text editor. Tests required are below. TEST 1 Open a 10 MB source file. Scroll around aggressively. Search for a string. Replace it. Save and reopen. TEST 2 Create 5 splits. Resize them. Switch between…”
“Thanks — really appreciate this. And yes, that .env problem is basically what pushed me into building the protection layer in the first place. 😅 It’s pattern-driven, but not regex-only. Browser Relay looks for common secret formats/API keys/tokens and .env-style sensitive values locally before relay. For structured data where possible, I also add validation instead of trusting a loose pattern alone — e.g. Luhn for payment cards and mod-97 for IBANs. I also try not to treat every KEY=value pair”
“grav was the closest fit for me, though it feels more like a full CMS than CouchCMS”
“I have a tangential question: how to get the green/red dots for what I’m assuming is ping status? A widget with ping URL gives me green and red text of up or down in the top right. ChatGPT took me in circles last night.”
“I wanted likes and comments on my own blog and every ready-made option either broke on the free tier or wanted a subscription. I am the only author on the site, so maintaining a whole user flow for it made no sense either. urthreads runs on a Cloudflare Worker with your own D1 database. Setup is one guided command: npm install -g urthreads wrangler login urthreads setup-env That walks you through creating or reusing a D1 database, writes .env and wrangler.toml, initializes the schema, and deploy”
“It watches GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, npm, and Slack. When one of those is actually down, a competitive browser game opens. Cursor had a brief incident yesterday, so it opened on Pac-Man. u/david-burns-dinner (Infamous Milk) topped the board. He is on the homepage, and he asked for a $25 Steam card instead of a Cursor Pro month. The arcade is locked again. Ping for the next one. https://nonines.dev/ping submitted by /u/Double_Ebb4130 [link] [comments”
“I was close to keeping this in “one more feature” mode, so I set a smaller launch rule: the main path had to work, notes could not disappear on the common path, and users needed a backup. Web Sticky Notes is now live. It lets you place draggable notes on regular webpages, restores them when you return, shows whether changes saved, and supports JSON backup/restore plus Markdown export. There is no account, analytics, backend, or cloud sync. Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/deta”
“I made this because I was frustrated with tool sites that require sign-ups, track you, or send your data to a server just to format some JSON.UtlKit has 170+ tools (JSON/YAML/SQL formatter, regex tester, hash generator, password tools, image utilities, audio utilities etc.) and everything runs in your browser. No sign-up, no tracking, no server-side processing.Built with Next.js 15 + Cloudflare Pages. Zero hosting cost.”
“that accessibility fingerprinting is a clever touch, most tools just shrug and leave you holding the bag”
“The safety mechanism is the real product: 30-day trash, undo, preview of what gets deleted. I built a cleanup flow for myself once - the preview line was what made people trust it. Good first customer.”
“Currently you can only see three window previews if you hover over it's icon. As someone who has a bazillion of open browser windows, I find it very limiting. It would be nice to be able to define multiple rows and columns to display the window previews. Being able to adjust the preview size would be the cherry on top : )”
“Got a spare 20 min this afternoon, will take it for a spin on my edge extension. The no-telemetry thing is reassuring, half the "test my tool" posts here are just data vacuums.”
“I've got thousands (okay maybe hundreds) of tabs in Chrome groups, not necessarily bookmarked, that I've been - obviously lol - putting off dealing with. I'd be interested in trying it out as long as it can use local models, is private, and doesn't rely on chatgpt for categorisation etc!”
“It watches GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, npm, and Slack. When one of those is actually down, a competitive browser game opens. Cursor had a brief incident this afternoon, so it opened on Pac-Man. Infamous Milk topped the board. He asked for a $25 Steam card instead of a Cursor Pro month. The arcade is locked again. Ping for the next one. https://nonines.dev/ping submitted by /u/Double_Ebb4130 [link] [comments]”
“Mine has its own internal fqdn and all my browsers use it as their default new tab, it’s how I hit my proxmox interface, dns, grafana and home assistant among others”
“fair enough, tho just a dev who got sick of whisperers and shouters in morning standups. shared the free tool in case it saves someone else's hearing”
“Google Calendar does embed fine, you just can't paste the iframe into the rich text editor, it strips it out. Click the html button, paste it in. Done/Done. No liquid needed 30 second job.”
“I've done this kind of thing many times. You need to make it simpler than whatever they're using now - Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Providing "unlimited space" compared to Google Photos is a good way. I'd trim down login to literally just be Basic HTTP Auth personally. The less hassle (from your end and theirs) the better. I share all my photos to my family in this kind of way, as it beats trying to email them ~8 at a time or do a Google Drive link or whatever.”
“Throwing this out there for roadmap consideration, but the permission for cameras and screen sharing should be a.) separated and b.) permissions based, rather than a toggle. Our current discord community is locked down …”
“I’m on Mac so ymmv TinyGit.app for gui git client Patterns app for regex testing Placeholder.co for fpo images (rip fillmurray)”
I have a bad habit of pressing CTRL + V in Guacamole, which is followed by 300+ Google Chrome browsers opening, what can I do to stop this is it painful!!! Thanks…
“> but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted toIs there an immediate mode GUI API that uses native widgets? I don't think I've ever seen that but would be curious to try it out. Does it work well in practice? If it doesn't exist, then it's kind of a moot point, isn't it?I sympathize with wanting "consistent behavior across multiple platforms", but that usually just results in "consistently kneecapped behavior across multiple platforms".”
“just tried it and apparently im not an admin on my own docker instance so i cannot add any media platform, hopefully that experience improves.”
Thank you. I've downloaded the app, I will install and test tomorrow.
“For osX, my first install whenever I get a new machine is Chrome, then Rectangles. I love living windows to the correct half screen with just few keystrokes.”
“Let’s share hidden gem tools, not the usual stuff that shows up in every "top developer tools" post, but smaller tools and projects that made you think, "wait, this is actually really useful." I'll start with 3 I've come across: 1. Archify https://github.com/tt-a1i/archify Found this recently. It's an agent skill that works with Claude Code, Cursor and Codex and basically turns a codebase into an interactive architecture map. You can export it as HTML/PNG/SVG/WebM”
“Thank you, exactly what I was looking for! It is similar with Edge as well. The path is %localappdata%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Preferences.”
“Hi all. I'm Tarwin. I've been working on TinyJS for about 6 weeks now.I was sick of installing 500mb Electron apps for every little utility. The last straw was Harvest updating from 5mb to 500mb in latest release.Tauri exists (and it's great) but I wanted something that was JS first. So I built this on top of txikijs, a tools that includes QuickJS and SQLite already.TinyJS does what it says it does. Small apps that can do almost anything. 100% JS.As part of building a tool like this I also built”
“Can't say for Edge but in Chrome those custom locations live in the Preferences JSON file in your profile folder. Path is usually something like ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences on linux or %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences on windows. Look for the "devtools" section and you'll see a "locations" array. Just grab that chunk and drop it into the same file on your new VM”
“Tab communication if you wanted to learn some of the neat new standards https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Broadcast_Channel_API”
“At the beginning I just wanted to get rid of Google Timeline and have a better privacy tool. I discovered Immich integration on my way to set up Reitti. You can create multiple users and track the position in near real-time (I guess it only depends how you set up the app on the mobile devices).”
“Like this, but the problem with such immediate mode GUI apps is that they constantly burn 1-2% of CPU when the app is idle. A waste of compute and power.”
“The lack of a licence implies that people have no permission to use the software (see https://choosealicense.com/no permission/). This probably isn't what you intended. In my opinion, either MIT (licence Kristal uses) or GPL3 would be a good choice for this project.”
“Today, my Chrome extension got its first paying customer. It is only one customer, but it was the first moment this felt like a real product rather than a project I had been building on my own. The idea started with the Google storage warning. The two obvious options felt blunt: upgrade your storage or delete your largest files. But the largest files are often family videos like my daughter's first steps, old photos, and other things I actually care about. So I built a third option. Storage”
“The headline for anyone not reading the whole thing: the working groups first choice is now a BFF that keeps tokens out of the browser entirely, your SPA just gets a session cookie. Tokens in localStorage went from "be careful" to effectively last resort, and the reasoning is sobering: with XSS the attacker doesnt need to exfiltrate your token at all, they can drive the whole authorization flow from inside your origin, so rotation and short lifetimes dont save you. The uncomfortable pa”
“The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.”
“Can we get one for how to test websites on a regular sized screen?That left-hand sidebar needs to be able to scroll on its own, unless you're on a 4k monitor. Otherwise, there's no way to view the bottom half of the list.”
“If the browser is failing while the desktop app works, I’d suspect something in the web session before the workspace itself. Incognito with extensions disabled would be my first test, then another browser/network.”
“I’m all for original but I personally would just be like… I need to customize this shii.”
“I asked Gemini within my Chrome browser about this. And got a good explination & many trouble shooting tips / fixes.”
“OpenClaw has been fairly useful for me. I tried Hermes but I don't think I have it enough of a shot. It's all personal assistant type stuff I use it for. I have Cron jobs for quick health checks, from my wifi network, home assistant, and me media server at home. I also have a kanban board and a skill I built to groom stories, dev, and QA them etc. It works really well. But I'm not sure where Hermes can do this better. You seem like someone who has used both... Care to offset any insi”
“This has worked great so far, running about 50 monitors and https via cloudflared. For the iOS widget how often does that poll to update?”
“This is helpful. I’ve been advocating for using MCP apps (with some limited MCP UI) for a while. My personal sense is I should focus on DMS, great search (especially as it feeds MCP), and some way for people to add knowledge & AI skills to a central repository to define workflows. I also have a background in cyber security and I believe there is a decent chunk of non obvious security requirements in this work. My sense is people will bring their Claude or OpenAI subscriptions so I should foc”
“You can also set up a free GWS account and do a managed chrome enterprise with managed chrome profiles. Biggest risk is going to be infostealers but there’s things you can do to mitigate that. Or if your users are MacBooks do managed Apple IDs and let them save you passwords. Browser management is more work on the IT but getting people using a password manager like Bitwarden is a hassle too. And OP doesn’t have to try and justify 30k/yr for a password manager. Main benefit of a manager over brow”
“the point about whatsapp mangling long links before you hit actual url limits is so true, thats always the real bottleneck”