DEV Community: I_See_You

I Built a Chrome Extension to Track How Long You Actually Spend on Each Tab

I_See_You — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:17:49 +0000

The Problem

You open a tab to "quickly check" something. Forty minutes later you're still there.

Browser history tells you what you visited. It never tells you how long you stayed. I kept losing track of time across research sessions, YouTube rabbit holes, and work dashboards — so I built something to fix it.

Introducing Tab Timer

Tab Timer is a Chrome extension that tracks time spent on any website and shows it live via a small floating widget directly on the page — no need to click anything, it's just always there.

Install on Chrome Web Store

Key Features

Floating On-Page Widget

A draggable timer widget lives right on the page. Choose from 4 sizes (Extra Compact to Large). You can customize which buttons show — pause, reset, and lock — or hide them entirely.

Focus Mode

When enabled, only the currently active tab's timer runs. Switch tabs, and the previous one pauses automatically. This gives you an honest measure of time actually spent looking at something, not just time it sat open.

Lock Timers

Refreshing a page normally resets a timer. Lock a tab's timer and it survives reloads. New timers start locked by default — so a page refresh doesn't wipe your session time.

Per-Site Control

Enable Tab Timer only on sites you want to track, or flip on "enable all sites" to track everything. You stay in control of what gets monitored.

Analytics

Tab Timer records your time locally and gives you:

Daily time breakdowns per site
Top sites by time spent
Trends over time

(Insert analytics screenshot here)

All data is stored in Chrome's local storage. Nothing is ever sent to any server.

How I Built It

Manifest V3 — built on the latest Chrome extension platform
Service Worker for background timer tracking
Chrome Storage API for persisting timers and analytics locally
Content Scripts for injecting the floating widget into pages
No frameworks, no build tools — plain JS, HTML, and CSS

The trickiest part was handling the Focus Mode logic: pausing timers across all tabs when the active tab changes, while making sure timers survive tab reloads and browser restarts without drifting.

Privacy

No accounts. No servers. No tracking of your data by me.

Everything Tab Timer records stays in your browser's local storage and never leaves your device.

What's Next

Time limits and alerts (e.g. notify after 30 min on a site)
Weekly email/export reports
Dark mode widget theme

Try It

Install Tab Timer from the Chrome Web Store

I'd love feedback, bug reports, or feature ideas — drop them in the comments below!