DEV Community: Roc Zin

Why I Only Show One Weather Metric in the Chrome Toolbar

Roc Zin — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:13:32 +0000

One of the weirdly difficult decisions I ran into while building SkyFeels was deciding what the toolbar icon should show.

Temperature was obvious.

Then I added AQI.

Then UV.

And at some point I had the very predictable thought: why not show all of them?

Turns out that gets ugly pretty fast.

The toolbar is tiny

A Chrome toolbar icon is not a mini dashboard.

You have almost no space, and users are not going to stare at it for five seconds trying to decode three numbers, two colors, and a tiny symbol.

I tried thinking through a few versions where multiple values could fit in there.

Technically, sure, you can do it.

But every version made the icon less useful.

The whole point of putting weather in the toolbar is that I should be able to look at it for half a second and understand it.

If I have to stop and read it, I may as well open the extension.

Most of the time, I only care about one thing

This was the part that made the decision easier.

I rarely look at the weather and ask:

What’s the temperature, AQI, and UV right now?

Usually it is one question.

Is it hot?

Is the air bad?

Is the UV high?

So SkyFeels lets you choose one of those three for the toolbar.

Temperature, AQI, or UV.

One at a time.

The rest is still there when you click.

It sounds like a small product decision, but it ended up defining a lot of the UI.

The toolbar and popup shouldn't compete

Once I accepted that the toolbar should stay simple, the rest of the product became easier to reason about.

The toolbar is for the quick glance.

The popup is where the detail lives.

Current conditions, hourly forecast, multi-day forecast, air quality, UV, saved locations — that stuff makes sense once you actually open the extension.

Trying to push more of it into the toolbar just because it technically fits felt like the wrong direction.

I ended up coming back to the same idea over and over:

Weather at a glance, details when you need them.

Constraints are kind of useful

I used to think of small UI space mostly as a limitation.

Now I think it is also a filter.

When you only have a tiny area to work with, every piece of information has to earn its place.

There is no easy "let's add another card" option.

That has been useful beyond the toolbar too.

I find myself asking "does this need to be visible all the time?" much more often now.

A lot of things do not.

Feature lists are a trap

This is probably the bigger lesson for me.

It is very easy to compare your product with competitors and start counting features.

They have this.

They have that.

We should probably add it too.

That thinking never really ends.

The harder part is deciding what should stay out.

For the toolbar, I chose one metric.

Not because the other data is unimportant, but because showing everything at once would make the main interaction worse.

I may change my mind later. Maybe rotating metrics turns out to be useful. Maybe some users genuinely want two values at once.

Still testing it.

But right now, I would rather have one thing that is immediately readable than three things fighting for the same 16 pixels.

Disclosure: I build SkyFeels, the Chrome weather extension I’m talking about here.

Chrome Web Store:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skyfeels-%E2%80%94-weather-toolba/dhkllljldghfpmedpbdiifdnbkbbngdk

I Compared 5 Weather Extensions for Chrome — Here’s How They Actually Differ

Roc Zin — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:17:01 +0000

I Compared 5 Weather Extensions for Chrome — Here’s How They Actually Differ

I recently spent some time comparing Chrome weather extensions while thinking about how different products in this category are positioned.

What surprised me is that they’re not really competing on the same thing.

Some are built around keeping one useful number in the toolbar. Some try to be full weather dashboards. Others lean more heavily into privacy, UV, AQI, radar, or customization.

So instead of ranking them from “best” to “worst,” I thought it would be more useful to look at what each extension is actually optimizing for.

At a glance: how these extensions differ

Weather

Best for: a familiar toolbar-first weather experience

Strengths: temperature in the toolbar, forecasts, radar, multiple locations

UV Weather

Best for: people who want a lot of weather data in one place

Strengths: UV, AQI, radar, alerts, long-range forecasts

Weatherly

Best for: free and privacy-focused use

Strengths: no ads, no tracking, forecasts, AQI, weather details

Forecastfox

Best for: a simple, traditional forecast extension

Strengths: current weather, forecasts, basic toolbar access

SkyFeels

Best for: customizable toolbar weather and a cleaner first view

Strengths: Temperature / UV / AQI in the toolbar, visual customization, detailed weather data on demand

The feature sets change over time, so it’s still worth checking the current Chrome Web Store listing before choosing one.

Weather: the classic toolbar-first approach

Weather is probably the easiest one to understand.

Its core idea is simple: keep the current temperature visible in your browser toolbar, then click the icon when you want hourly forecasts, daily forecasts, radar, or more detail.

That basic workflow has stayed intact even as the extension has added more features.

The current version includes hourly and daily forecasts, radar, multiple locations, different weather sources, themes, toolbar contrast controls, and optional Pro features such as custom toolbar colors, feels-like temperature, alerts, summaries, and additional saved locations.

One thing I like about Weather is that it doesn’t try to turn the toolbar itself into a dashboard. The toolbar is mainly there to answer one question quickly: what’s the temperature?

The downside is that if you want the toolbar to show something other than temperature — air quality or UV, for example — that isn’t really the product’s focus.

Good fit for: someone who wants a mature, familiar weather extension with temperature always visible and more information one click away.

UV Weather: the feature-heavy option

UV Weather takes almost the opposite approach.

It packs a lot into one extension: temperature, UV, AQI, pollutants, multiple locations, live radar, weather alerts, minute-by-minute precipitation, hourly forecasts, multi-day forecasts, and additional paid features. Its toolbar can also display a large Temperature or UV value.

If you enjoy exploring weather data, that’s a real strength.

You don’t have to jump between several services just to check UV, air quality, precipitation, radar, and a longer forecast.

The trade-off is fairly obvious: there is simply more going on.

For someone who mainly wants to glance at the weather while working in Chrome, that amount of information can be more than necessary. For someone who actively follows UV, air quality, rain, and detailed forecasts, it’s probably an advantage rather than a drawback.

Good fit for: people who want one extension to cover as many weather-related metrics and tools as possible.

Weatherly: free and privacy-focused

Weatherly stands out for a different reason.

Its Chrome Web Store listing puts a lot of emphasis on being free, with no ads, tracking, data mining, or selling of user data. It still includes a substantial weather feature set: current conditions, hourly and seven-day forecasts, AQI, atmospheric data, wind, astronomy information, charts, themes, and a toolbar badge.

That’s an interesting position in a category where many products eventually introduce subscriptions or paid upgrades.

Weatherly also offers both Lite and Advanced modes, which is a sensible way of dealing with the usual tension between simplicity and detailed data.

Its main distinction isn’t really a novel way of using Chrome’s toolbar. It’s the combination of a fairly broad weather feature set with a free, privacy-oriented model.

Good fit for: people who strongly prefer a free weather extension and care about avoiding ads and tracking.

Forecastfox: a more traditional weather extension

Forecastfox feels closer to the older generation of browser weather extensions.

It focuses on international weather forecasts, current temperature, upcoming conditions, wind, humidity, location settings, display settings, and update frequency. Its Chrome listing describes it as a way to keep weather information available directly from the toolbar.

That simplicity can be useful.

Not everyone needs AI summaries, environmental metrics, or a highly customized dashboard. Sometimes a forecast extension only needs to answer “What’s it like outside?” and “What’s happening over the next few days?”

Forecastfox has a much smaller user base than Weather or UV Weather today, but it still fills a clear role: a fairly conventional browser weather tool without a long list of secondary features.

Good fit for: someone looking for a straightforward forecast extension with a more traditional browser-extension feel.

SkyFeels: more control over what stays in the toolbar

SkyFeels starts from a slightly different question:

What weather information is useful enough that you might want it visible before you even open the extension?

Instead of limiting the toolbar to temperature, SkyFeels can use it for Temperature, UV, or AQI. It also puts more emphasis on how that toolbar value looks, with additional font and visual customization options.

That matters more than it might sound.

Temperature is probably the most universally useful weather number, but it isn’t always the one you care about most. Someone planning outdoor exercise might care more about UV. Someone in a city dealing with wildfire smoke or pollution might want AQI visible all day.

Inside the popup, SkyFeels deliberately takes a different approach from a feature-heavy dashboard.

The first view is meant to be easy to scan: current conditions, forecasts, UV, AQI, and the information most people are likely to check quickly. More detailed weather metrics are available when you want to dig deeper rather than being placed in front of you immediately.

There are trade-offs here too.

If radar and severe-weather tooling are the center of your weather workflow, Weather or UV Weather are currently more natural choices. SkyFeels is more focused on everyday browser use: quick toolbar information, a clean overview, and deeper data when needed.

Good fit for: someone who wants Temperature, UV, or AQI in the Chrome toolbar and prefers a simpler first view without giving up detailed weather information.

So which one should you use?

I don’t think there is a useful overall winner here.

The differences are mostly about priorities.

If I wanted a mature temperature-in-the-toolbar extension with radar and alerts, I’d look closely at Weather.

If I wanted the broadest set of weather, UV, AQI, radar, and forecast features in one place, UV Weather would make more sense.

If free, no ads, and privacy were the main criteria, Weatherly would deserve a serious look.

If I wanted a traditional lightweight forecast extension, Forecastfox still fills that role.

And if I cared most about choosing what weather metric stays visible in the toolbar and keeping the main interface relatively uncluttered, SkyFeels would be the more relevant option.

The part I found most interesting wasn’t the number of features. It was how differently each product defines what “quick weather access” should mean inside a browser.

That’s probably the more useful way to think about this category: not as five versions of the same product, but as five different answers to the same design problem.

A note on this comparison

I build SkyFeels, so I’m obviously not a completely neutral observer.

For that reason, I’ve tried to keep the comparison above focused on publicly verifiable features and on where each product takes a genuinely different approach, rather than declaring one extension “the best.”

Weather extensions also change fairly often. If a specific feature matters to you — especially pricing, radar, alerts, forecast length, or paid features — check the current Chrome Web Store listing before installing.

Try these extensions

If you want to compare them yourself, here are the current Chrome Web Store listings: