Glimpse is a powerful, lightweight Chrome extension that fundamentally improves your browsing efficiency. It allows you to preview any link in a clean, modal overlay without ever leaving your current page. Say goodbye to endless context switching and tab management.

• 🖱️ Instant Previews: Hold Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and click any link to instantly open it in a Glimpse window.
• 🖼️ Modern Modal UI: Previews appear in a large, centered overlay with a blurred background, focusing your attention.
• 🚀 Works Everywhere: Glimpse is designed to work on everything from simple blogs to complex, JavaScript-heavy web apps.
• 🔐 Secure & Private: Glimpse is built with a "privacy-first" philosophy. It requests minimal permissions, processes everything locally, and collects no user data.
• UX-Focused:
  • Click anywhere outside the preview or press Escape to close it.
  • The background page is locked from scrolling while a preview is active.
  • Seamlessly open the original link in a new tab with the "Reopen" button.

Status: Glimpse is currently under review for publication on the Chrome Web Store.

1. Download or Clone: Get the code from this repository: git clone https://github.com/fyzanshaik/glimpse.git
2. Open Chrome Extensions: Navigate to chrome://extensions/ in your browser.
3. Enable Developer Mode: Turn on the "Developer mode" toggle in the top-right corner.
4. Load the Extension: Click "Load unpacked" and select the cloned repository folder.
5. Ready to Go! Glimpse is now active and ready to use.

Glimpse uses a sophisticated, multi-layered approach to provide a seamless and secure preview experience.

Instead of listening for a click event, Glimpse listens for mousedown. This event fires earlier, allowing the extension to reliably intercept a link activation before a website's own scripts can interfere. This is crucial for compatibility with complex, single-page applications.

Previews are loaded into a sandboxed <iframe>. This is a critical security measure that isolates the previewed content from the main page and the extension itself. We use a strict sandbox policy (allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation) that prevents the loaded page from executing malicious actions, such as trying to redirect the top-level page.

Many websites use security headers like X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy to prevent themselves from being embedded in other sites. To enable previews for these sites, Glimpse uses the declarativeNetRequest API to modify these headers.

This is a powerful permission, and we use it in a highly restricted manner:

• The header modification rule applies only to requests with a resourceType of "sub_frame".
• This means Glimpse does not and cannot interfere with network requests for your normal, top-level browsing. Its modifications are precisely targeted only at content being loaded into the Glimpse preview frame.

Transparency is a core value of this project. Here is a detailed explanation of the permissions Glimpse requires and why they are absolutely necessary for the extension to function.

The activeTab permission is a more secure alternative to <all_urls>, but it only grants access to a page after a user clicks the extension's toolbar icon. Glimpse's functionality is triggered by an on-page action (Ctrl+Click), which requires a content script to be present and listening before the user acts. For this reason, activeTab is not a viable alternative for Glimpse's specific interaction model.

• No Data Collection: Glimpse does not collect, store, or transmit any personal data or browsing history.
• Local Processing: All logic and data handling (like accessing a clicked URL) happens locally on your machine.
• No Remote Code: The extension does not fetch or execute any remote code, ensuring its behavior is fixed and verifiable from the source code in this repository.

This project is open-source and contributions are welcome. Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

Glimpse is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.