Desktop Pet: Virtual Companions

Bring a little more life to your browsing with a few small animals that live on your web pages.

Desktop Pet drops a handful of hand-drawn pixel-art companions into the pages you already visit. They walk, climb, fly and hop around the page while you read, and they get on with their own day whether or not you are paying attention. Nothing to feed, no timers, no chores. Just something alive in the corner of your screen. It is free, with no ads and nothing to unlock. It is part of the Invenio Vero Extension family, a collection of small, lightweight browser extensions built to make everyday browsing a little better without getting in the way. MEET THE PETS Each one behaves differently, because each one has its own temperament rather than a shared script. • Cat: calm and curious. It has the run of the whole window, walking the floor, climbing the walls and strolling upside down along the ceiling. It looks over when your cursor drifts past, sometimes follows it for a few steps, and bolts if you come right up to its face. It grooms itself when it thinks nobody is watching. • Jaguar: sleepy and fierce. A big spotted cat with a soft spot for naps. It dozes off whenever it feels like it, wakes up with a long stretch and a yawn, and rolls onto its back when it is feeling lazy. Pet it and it rolls over for a belly rub. Every so often it freezes and stares at the page as if something is moving in the grass, then creeps forward one slow step at a time. It climbs too, but never more than halfway up the wall, and how it gets back down is up to its mood: a leap, a slide or headfirst. Get too close and it does not run, it shows you its teeth and lets out a little roar, and then it goes straight back to being a sleepy cat. • Dog: friendly and playful. The busiest of them on its feet. It notices your cursor from most of the way across the window and usually trots straight over to sit and stare at you. It barks. It bounces on the spot when it gets excited. • Schnauzer: alert and spirited. A little salt-and-pepper terrier with bushy eyebrows and a big grey beard, first bred on German farms to catch rats. It is the keenest watchdog of the lot and spots your cursor from right across the window. As far as it is concerned your mouse is exactly the kind of thing it was bred to catch, so it often stalks over, crouches low and pounces on it with a yap, and once it has set off it does not give up until it has pinned it. Come right up close and it is not scared in the slightest, it just pounces. Leave it be and it patrols the page, stands guard and sits up looking very pleased with itself. • Blue Jay: active and curious. It spends most of its time in the air, beating up to a cruising height and gliding back down to hop about for a while. You get the crest, the black necklace and the barred tail. It preens between perches, stretches its wings, and is gone the moment you get too close. • Robin: bold and territorial. This is the one that comes to you. It spends more of its day on the floor than in the air, hopping about and pecking at things, and when your cursor comes near it will often set off after it, because as far as a robin is concerned anything moving through its patch is either food or a rival. Once it has set off it does not lose interest either: it stays on your pointer until it catches up, gives it a peck, and only then goes off about its business. Try to outrun it and it simply comes faster, since the longer the chase goes on the more determined it gets. It does the same on the wing, breaking out of a glide to come after you across the page. Move the mouse off the page entirely and it gives up, since there is nothing left to catch. It never runs away from you. • Duck: sleepy and hungry. A mallard with a shiny green head, a white collar and an appetite that never switches off. It is forever finding bits of bread on the floor, and it keeps going back for more. In between snacks it dozes off whenever it likes, and the first thing it does when it wakes up is eat again. It can fly, but it would much rather waddle. Bring your cursor near and it often waddles straight over, hoping you brought something, and tucks in when it gets there. Come right up to its face and it flaps off into the air. • Pigeon: friendly and follows you. A grey town pigeon with a shiny green and purple neck, and the one bird that has never been scared of anybody. It struts about the floor with its head bobbing back and forth, and only takes to the air now and then. Every so often it notices your cursor and wanders after it for a bit, and when it catches up it puffs out its chest, bows and coos at you. Come right up to it and it gets excited rather than flying off, and if you pet it, it coos for you too. • Frog: lazy and unpredictable. It mostly sits perfectly still, with the occasional hop or short walk breaking things up. It barely notices you until you are right on top of it, and then it bolts away in hops. It snaps at passing flies. • Rabbit: skittish and watchful. The opposite of the frog, nearly always on the move, bounding across the page in long flat hops and stopping to freeze and listen. It sees you coming from a long way off, and its first instinct is to stare rather than ignore you. It thumps a hind foot. It never comes to you, and if you get close it is gone. • Kangaroo: tough and protective. It gets about in big, powerful bounds, and in between it stands tall on its tail or goes down on all fours to graze. It is the one pet that stands its ground. Bring your cursor too close and it takes that as a threat: up go the red boxing gloves, and it squares up and throws punches at your pointer, turning to keep you in front of it, and now and then it even hops over to have a go at a cursor that is hanging about nearby. Every so often a little joey pokes its head out of the pouch to have a look around, and now and then it climbs right out, hops about next to its mother for a bit and jumps back in. Bring your cursor near while it is out and it dashes straight back to the pouch. Pet the kangaroo and the joey comes out to see you too. • Ghost: shy and spooky. The one pet that is not an animal, and the only one you can see through. It drifts about in the air, hangs upside down from the top of the page by the hem of its sheet, and floats up and down the walls. When it reaches the side of the window it often just keeps going, fading out through one edge and drifting back in through the other. Bring your cursor near and it fades until it is barely there, then stares back at you or slips away into the air. Catch it right under your cursor, though, and it turns solid again, and if you pet it, it blushes. Every so often it throws its arms up and shouts BOO. THEY KNOW YOU ARE THERE Point at a pet and it will turn its head to look at you. Come closer and what happens next depends on who it is. One will wander over, another will freeze, another will bolt, one will come after your cursor until it catches it, another will pounce on it like a mouse, one will waddle over hoping you brought bread, one will strut after it and coo, one will put its gloves up and box it, one will show you its teeth, and one will fade away until you can hardly see it. Leave the mouse alone for long enough and they curl up and fall asleep right there on the page, then wake up when you move it again. They will not react to every twitch of the cursor, and that is on purpose. A pet that answers every movement stops reading as an animal and starts reading as a toy. PET THEM, PICK THEM UP, PUT THEM DOWN Click a pet to pet it. Drag one to pick it up and carry it anywhere on the page, then let go. Where you drop it matters. Hold a cat against a wall or up at the ceiling and it catches hold and carries on climbing. Give the jay some height and it simply flies off. Anything else drops to the floor and shakes it off. THEY FOLLOW YOU BETWEEN TABS Your pets are not stuck to one page. Switch tabs and they come with you, picked up mid-stride rather than starting over, so you have one small group of animals following you around the web instead of a fresh herd in every tab. A UFO SOMETIMES SHOWS UP Every so often a UFO drops in out of nowhere and drifts back and forth up near the top of the page for a while before disappearing again the same way it arrived. Most of the time that is all it does. Every so often, though, it spots a pet, walking or flying, and pulls it straight up into the ship on a beam of light before flying off. A little while later it comes back and lets the pet go somewhere new on the page, sometimes lowered gently on the beam and sometimes simply dropped from up in the sky, which anything with wings turns into a flight rather than a fall. It happens on its own every few minutes, and there is a switch in the popup if you would rather it never happened at all. MAKE IT YOURS • Add up to 20 pets, in any mix you like • Three sizes, from a discreet 32px up to a hard-to-miss 96px • One switch turns them all off and on again, without losing your roster • A separate switch for the UFO, on by default, if you would rather your pets stayed put SIGN IN AND YOUR PETS ARE SAVED Signing in is completely optional. Everything above works without it. But if you sign in with your Google account from the popup, your pets are saved to your account: which pets you picked, how many of each, their size and your switches. Sign in on another browser, on the same computer or a different one, and the same pets are waiting for you there. Change your herd in one browser and the others pick up the change the next time they check in, so every browser you are signed in to keeps the same pets in sync. That also means your pets are never lost. Reinstall the extension, move to a new laptop or clear your browser, sign in again, and your herd comes straight back. Sign out whenever you like and the pets you picked stay put in that browser. STAYS OUT OF THE WAY The pets live on a transparent layer that clicks straight through to the page underneath. Links, buttons, text selection and scrolling all behave exactly as they normally do, and the layer only becomes clickable in the moment your cursor is genuinely over a pet. They stay put while you scroll, and they never cover what you are reading for long, because they are always walking somewhere else. Pets in tabs you are not looking at stop moving entirely, so only the page in front of you is ever doing any work. WHERE THEY CANNOT GO Chrome does not let extensions draw on its own pages, so the pets will not appear on the New Tab page, on chrome:// pages, in the Web Store, or in the built-in PDF viewer. On every ordinary website they are there. The pets also live inside the web page itself. They are not on your computer's desktop, your taskbar, or anywhere outside the browser. PRIVACY No tracking, no ads, and Desktop Pet never looks at the pages you visit. Nothing about your browsing ever leaves your browser. Without signing in, the only thing it stores is your own settings, which pets you picked and what size you like, kept locally by Chrome, and it works perfectly well with no internet connection at all. If you choose to sign in, we keep those same settings with your account so they can be saved and follow you to your other browsers, tied to the Google account you signed in with. If you send us a pet idea, we keep what you wrote with your account so we can read it. The full privacy policy is at https://invenioveroextension.com/desktop-pet/privacy TELL US WHICH PET COMES NEXT Is there an animal you would love to see wandering your tabs? Open the popup, sign in with your Google account, press Suggest a pet, type in the animal and, if you like, anything it should do. A hamster in a wheel, a sleepy sloth, a goose with a bad attitude: every idea goes straight to the developer and helps decide which pet joins the herd next. BUY THE DEVELOPER A COFFEE Desktop Pet is free, and it stays free. There are no ads, no subscription and nothing locked behind a payment. It is made by one developer who simply enjoys giving the pets new tricks. If they have made your browsing a little nicer and you feel like saying thanks, there is a Buy a coffee button at the bottom of the popup that opens a PayPal page. Every coffee is a big boost to keep new pets and new behaviours coming. It is entirely optional, and the pets will not hold it against you either way. WHAT'S NEW The herd has a new member, and it came from your suggestions again: the Pigeon. Someone asked for a pigeon that is friendly and follows the cursor once in a while, so that is exactly what it does. It struts around the page with that famous head bob, wanders after your cursor every now and then, and when it reaches you it puffs up and coos. It is not shy either, so you can walk right up and pet it. Thank you to whoever sent it in. Add it from the popup, and keep the ideas coming with the Suggest a pet button. PART OF THE INVENIO VERO EXTENSION FAMILY Desktop Pet is made by Invenio Vero, alongside a growing set of small browser extensions that share the same idea. Do one thing well, stay light, and leave your browsing alone the rest of the time. See the rest of the family at https://invenioveroextension.com