During a long chat with Nick, I discovered a solution to one of my long standing problems. I had a list of advice to myself on Google Keep. Not wanting to set it as my browser homepage I tried to make a habit of going to that page everyday. This obviously did not last very long, and soon, there was an item on my todo list that said, “Figure out what do to with advice to yourself”. This stupid, and funnily worded todo item remained on my list for almost a year.

Until of course Nick showed me his homepage. Yes, he had built a homepage for himself, long before the flood of “start page” browser plugins. Among the links to commonly visited pages, and the nine different search fields, what intrigued me most was the word “breathe” randomly written in the middle column. Refresh the page and the word changed to “simplify”. He had programmed it to pseudo-randomly choose from a list of words that he had selected. Jackpot!

Not being as old-school as he is, I decided to make a “start page” browser plugin. This was around the time of the bittersweet Mozilla announcement:

By the end of 2017, and with the release of Firefox 57, we’ll move to WebExtensions exclusively, and will stop loading any other extension types on desktop.

With support being added for chrome_url_overrides in Firefox 54, I started work on Breathe. A WebExtension that shows you a message from your pre-decided list every time you open a new tab.

You can download the extension from AMO right now, I am still working on getting it published on the Chrome Web Store (Update: Published!). If you don’t like waiting (for the Chrome version, or for updates) you can install it directly from the source.