Charlie Gerard, a developer and senior engineer at CrowdStrike, has created a Chrome extension called Overgrown. The tool covers abandoned browser tabs with vines and dense vegetation if the user doesn’t return to them for a long time.
Charlie Gerard, a developer and senior engineer at CrowdStrike, has created a Chrome extension called Overgrown. The tool covers abandoned browser tabs with vines and dense vegetation if the user doesn’t return to them for a long time.
The developer announced this on her blog. The main idea of the project is a digital "apocalypse" in the browser. Each open tab has its own idle time countdown, which runs until the user views it. The longer the tab remains unattended, the more plants appear on the screen, moving from the edges to the center.
"I recently did a little creative assignment related to the word 'overgrowth.' The first thing that came to mind was an apocalyptic scene, something like The Walking Dead or The Last of Us, where abandoned buildings are overgrown with plants," said Charlie Gerard.
When the level of overgrowth exceeds 5%, the page becomes uninteractive: the user loses the ability to click, select text, or drag elements, although scrolling remains active. To regain access to the content, the overgrowth must be cleared manually with the mouse cursor.
For interactivity, the author added the ability to choose a "weapon" to clear the page — from a rusty machete to a chainsaw or flamethrower. In the settings, you can also adjust the growth rate of vines.
“It may not make me read them more often, but cutting through the vines makes returning to them a lot more fun,” noted Charlie Gerard.
The extension consists of three parts: a background script (background.js) that monitors open and closed tabs, a settings popup, and a content script with sounds, animations, and SVG models of plants and weapons. It is available on the developer's GitHub .
