Reading dense material, I'd hit a term I half-understood and face the same bad trade-off: open a new tab and lose my place, or keep going and miss the concept the rest of the paragraph depends on.
So I built rabbitholes — a Chrome extension where highlighting any text renders an explanation inline via shadow DOM next to your cursor, without touching the host page's styles or layout.
The part I use most: every word in the explanation is itself clickable. You're reading about Byzantine fault tolerance, you highlight it, the explanation mentions consensus algorithms, you click that phrase, you go deeper. A hop counter tracks how far you've gone; at some point you hit 'philosophy' and you've earned it.
A few specific things I cared about in the build:
Zero intermediary server. Requests go directly from your browser to api.anthropic.com. There's no backend logging your queries. Your Anthropic API key stays in chrome.storage.sync and never leaves the browser.
Shadow DOM, not an iframe. An iframe can't match host-page fonts without a flash of unstyled content. Shadow DOM renders the tooltip isolated but visually coherent.
Follow-up input inherits context. The pencil icon opens a free-form field that carries everything you've already read in that session as background. You're not starting over each time.
Web-grounded answers on demand. The globe icon re-runs the query enriched with Brave Search results, with source chips you can click through. For anything where recency matters, this closes the gap.
Manifest V3, no analytics, no telemetry.
The thing I noticed after a few weeks of using it: I read differently. I stop skipping past the fuzzy edges of things.
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