Reading a dense article about monetary policy last month, I hit the phrase "sterilized intervention" three times. I half-knew what it meant. Not enough to follow the argument, enough to feel like opening a tab would be overkill. I skipped it. By the end I'd accumulated six of those gaps and the article hadn't really landed.
rabbitholes is a Chrome extension that closes those gaps without breaking context. Highlight any text — a phrase, a sentence, a term you half-know — and a shadow-DOM tooltip renders an explanation next to your cursor using Claude Haiku 4.5. The shadow DOM matters: it doesn't inject styles or nodes into the host page, so nothing breaks and nothing leaks.
The part I actually use most: click any word inside the explanation to explore it further. Or drag across a phrase to select it. You're building a trail through the concepts, not opening tabs.
Two things the extension does that I didn't expect to care about when I started building:
The rabbit-hole counter. It tracks how many hops deep you've gone in a session. If you start on "sterilized intervention" and end up at "Bretton Woods" four clicks later, the trail is there. Hit a philosophy dead-end and there's a shareable link to the path.
The Globe icon. Re-answers your highlighted query enriched with live Brave Search results. Source chips are clickable. Useful when the static model answer is too abstract or you want to see how a term is used in current coverage.
No telemetry, no intermediary server. Requests go directly from your browser to api.anthropic.com and api.search.brave.com. Your Anthropic API key lives in chrome.storage.sync — encrypted, never leaves the browser.
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