Open It Later
Here’s the first of several Chrome and Chromium browser extensions I’ve recently written. Earlier, I posted some of the background motivation in Alternate browsing realities.
After installing Open It Later, your browser will randomly delay following links you click on. That is, instead of following the link in your existing tab, it immediately closes the tab! :-) If you open a new tab and try to go to a URL, that tab will immediately close too. The URL you were trying to reach will be opened in a new tab at a random future time, between 15 seconds and 5 minutes later.
This is pretty silly, of course. It deliberately goes directly against the idea that there should be an immediate (useful) reaction from your browser when you click a link. Think of it as something that slows you down, that makes your browsing more considered, that gives you a pause during which you might forget about something that you didn’t really need to read anyway.
Open It Later installs a context menu item that shows you the number of URLs that are pending opening. Click the context menu item to disable the extension. Not only will it ungrudgingly disable itself without pause, it will also immediately open all URLs that were scheduled to be opened in the future.
The extension is not in the Chrome Web Store yet. It’s still very easy to install: just click here to download the extension, then follow these instructions.
If you’re a programmer, or just curious about how to build Chrome extensions, the source code is available on Github. For info on when the extension plans to open your URLs, you can look in the console of its background page, accessible from chrome://extensions.
Special thanks to Hugh McLeod, who (unknowingly) provided Open It Later‘s Snake Oil icon:
Image: Hugh McLeod
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.