A Browser Extension for Researchers/Learners… – Part 1

As someone who loves learning, I spend a lot of time researching different topics every day. I jump between Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, blogs, documentation, eBooks, research papers, etc.

The problem is that when I come back to the same topic a day or two later, I realize I’ve forgotten most of what I learned. The information is scattered across multiple tabs and sources, and while taking notes would help, I’m honestly not consistent enough to do it every time.

There are already tools that summarize web pages, but they usually summarize a single page or require you to manually select the content you want. That wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

So I started building a browser extension that captures and summarizes an entire research session instead of individual pages.

The workflow is simple:

Step 1: Capture

• Turn on a capture toggle before you start researching.
• Choose which browser tabs should be included in the session.
• As you browse, the extension captures the content from each selected page.

Step 2: Summarize

• As each page is captured, it is immediately summarized instead of waiting until the end of the session.
• This process repeats for every page you visit, creating a concise summary for each source. For the MVP, I’m using the on-device Gemini Nano model to do the summarization.
• Finally, you can export all the summaries as a single text file or PDF for future reference.

Right now, I’m focusing on building the MVP. I plan to use it myself for two weeks to see whether it actually improves my own learning workflow. If it proves useful, I’ll continue improving it and run a small beta with around 10 users to gather feedback before taking it further.

This is one of those projects that started because I wanted to solve my own problem first. Hopefully, it ends up helping other researchers, students, developers, and lifelong learners as well.

I’ll keep sharing updates as the project evolves.

Building products that solve your own problems is one of the most rewarding parts of being a developer.

Happy coding everyone! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧