Let Your Browser Tabs Cheer You up With Puppies and Kittens
Chrome, Firefox: This has been a tough week for many of us, and you’re probably a little nervous right now.
So what is a person to do? Here’s one simple incentive: Let your browser cheer you up with cute animals. Cute animals don’t care about politics, they only care about games; filibuster friendliness; dozing off because of news ( fake or otherwise). Every time you open a new tab, you should see something that surprises and delights you – a cute animal filling the growing void of despair and doubt.
If you are using Chrome, I highly recommend checking out the My Cats extension from the developer mystart.com. While it sounds simple at first glance – the new, randomized cat image fills in the new tabs you open – the extension also has a few little tricks that make it useful for more than just hunting and gasping.
Each new tab has not only built-in web search (you’ll want to set it to Google instead of Yahoo by default by clicking the hamburger icon in the top right corner), but you can also easily open your favorite Chrome apps, bookmarks, and a list of your most visited web pages. You can drag and drop your to-do list onto your cat’s tab, see the time and six-day forecast, quickly bring up some relaxing music, access shortcuts to your favorite sites, and essentially create your own custom tab page – with the big cat in the center. There is a version of the extension for dog lovers . Equal opportunity and that’s it.
If you are using Firefox, you will get a simpler appeal. If you only care about cats and only cats, I highly recommend checking out the adorable Tabby Cat extension. Each time you load a new tab, you will see a new cartoon image of cats in different positions, different colors, and sitting next to (or interacting with) different toys.
The more tabs you open, the more toys you get, and some toys only attract certain cats. .. you already know the exercise. Have fun spending more time looking at blank, cat-filled tabs than the sites you usually visit.
I haven’t been able to find a great extension for dogs – sorry – so you might just have to use the more general New Tab Small Animals Gallery extension . You can probably guess what it does from its name, but if not, here’s a quick explanation: open a new tab, get a new image of a baby animal on each one. Scream for joy. Repetition.
Like the Chrome extension I mentioned, the new Little Animals Gallery tab also includes a small search bar, weather updates, and a context menu for accessing other sites. But that’s not why you came here; you’ve come here for adorable animals, and this extension claims to offer an ongoing rotation of “high definition baby animals.” What else do you want?
Do you have a Chrome or Firefox extension that you really like? Tell us about it: david.murphy@lifehacker.com .