Reading a long piece on monetary policy, I hit 'sterilization operations' — a term I half-knew. My options were: open a new tab and lose my place, or skim past it and stay shallow. I've made that tradeoff a thousand times, always in the wrong direction.
rabbitholes is a Chrome extension that breaks that choice. Highlight any text, and a shadow-DOM tooltip renders an explanation from Claude Haiku 4.5 next to your cursor — no new tab, no page reload, nothing injected into the host DOM. Click any word in the explanation to keep going. Drag across a phrase to explore it as a unit.
The part I use most: every explanation ends with two suggested rabbit-hole topics, the most interesting threads from wherever you landed. A hop counter tracks how deep you've gone. Follow the chain far enough and you reliably end up somewhere strange — hit 'philosophy' and it generates a shareable trail.
When you want sources instead of synthesis, the globe icon re-runs the query against Brave Search and returns the same explanation enriched with source chips. When you want to push the conversation somewhere specific, the pencil icon opens a free-form input that inherits the current context.
No analytics, 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 and never leaves the browser. Manifest V3 throughout.
I built it because I wanted Wikipedia on every page — not a Wikipedia tab, but the actual feeling of every concept being one gesture away, inline, without the context break. It's close enough now that I use it on almost everything I read.
github.com/robertnowell/rabbitholes
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