Hawser

Connects this browser to the Hawser app on this PC so Hawser can tell focused browsing from drift.

Hawser is a Windows app that sits alongside your work and nudges you back when you drift. This extension is its browser half. Here is the problem it solves. Hawser can see that your browser is in front of you. It cannot see which tab, so eight hours of work and eight hours of drift look exactly the same to it. A blocker has the same blind spot: it cannot tell a ten hour work day from a ten hour binge. This extension is what tells them apart. WHAT IT SENDS, EXACTLY The name of the site you are on, and how long you were on it. A total per site: youtube.com, 12 minutes. That is the whole of it. Totals go over within a few seconds of the site in front changing, at most twice a minute, and otherwise every five minutes or when you leave the browser. Never the address of a page. The path and the search terms are dropped inside the extension before anything is sent, so Hawser is never told which video, which document or which search. Never a list of when you went where, only totals. Time counts only while a browser window is the window you are actually in. Every call also says which browser is calling: a random number this copy makes up for itself, what the browser calls itself, and which version of the extension is running. It is how two browsers are told apart, and how Hawser can tell you when a browser is running an out of date copy. It says nothing about you, and nothing about your machine beyond which browser this is. It all goes to the Hawser app on your own PC, over a loopback connection that cannot leave the machine. Nothing is sent to us or to anyone else. Nothing about your browsing is given to an AI. WHAT IT SHOWS YOU Hawser cannot open a window inside your browser, so when it has something to say while you are browsing, it leaves it here. The toolbar icon picks up a mark, and the panel behind it has the words, with a button to close them. You can also have it appear where you are actually looking. Turn on "Show Hawser's nudges on the page I am on" and Hawser's words arrive in a card on the page you are reading, with a button to close it. How that card appears is your choice, and you make it in Hawser rather than here, so there is one setting rather than two that could disagree: a small card in the corner that comes to the middle of the screen if you leave it alone, the middle of the screen every time, or the corner only. A card in the middle dims the page behind it and holds it until you close it. Escape always closes it, and so does clicking the dimmed area. The card says who is speaking, twice over: the Hawser wordmark at the top, and a line at the bottom reading "From the Hawser app on this PC. Not from this website, and this website cannot read it." It is drawn in Hawser's own colours and type rather than the page's, so it reads as Hawser speaking over the page rather than as something the site put there. That card needs permission to reach websites, and this extension does not ask for it at install. It is an optional permission, so installing this extension grants access to no website at all. Your browser asks you at the moment you tick that box, and unticking it hands the access straight back, which you can check in your browser's extensions page under Site access. Leave it switched off and everything else works exactly the same: nudges arrive on the toolbar icon, and nothing is ever put in a page. The card is the only thing this extension ever puts in a page, and it is only put there when Hawser has something to say. It cannot read the page: not the address, not the text, not what you type. The page cannot read it either. Nothing about the page is sent anywhere, and closing the card leaves the page exactly as it was. Some pages cannot take it, such as the browser's own pages, the Chrome Web Store, local files and PDFs, and on those the toolbar icon carries the nudge instead. Your own quiet settings still come first. Away mode, a pause, and quieted nudges hold a nudge back here exactly as they do on the desktop, so switching this on cannot make Hawser louder than you asked it to be. This version does not block anything. It cannot stop a page loading or send you somewhere else, and it asks for no permission that would let it. WHAT YOU NEED Hawser for Windows, version 0.4.19 or newer, installed and running on the same computer, with agent access switched on in its Settings, under About and advanced. Then: press "Connect this browser" in this extension's options page. Hawser shows you a card naming this browser and listing what it would be able to see and do. Press Allow. That is the whole setup. Nothing is copied, nothing is typed, and the key Hawser hands over never appears on screen. If you would rather do it by hand, or you have moved Hawser off its usual port, Hawser's Settings under Agent access has a "Connect a browser" button that gives you a code to paste in here instead. Each browser is its own connection, so if you use two, connect each one. Each gets its own key, its own browsing totals, its own nudges, and its own entry in Hawser's Settings, where you can rename or disconnect either one on its own. Without Hawser running on the same machine, this extension does nothing at all. THE OFF SWITCHES Three switches in the options page: "Report where my browsing time goes", "Let Hawser nudge me here", and "Show Hawser's nudges on the page I am on". Any of them can be turned off at any time. Turn the first one off and the counting stops the moment you do. Turn the third one off and the access to websites goes straight back with it. Disconnect throws away the key and anything not yet sent. Revoking this browser inside Hawser stops it from the other end. Please do not enable this extension for incognito windows. We do not ask for that access, and an incognito window is one you have already said you do not want a record of. THE PERMISSIONS, AND WHY EACH ONE IS HERE storage: to remember, across restarts, the key Hawser issued and the port it listens on, the seconds counted but not yet sent, the random number that identifies this copy, your switches, and any nudge currently on screen. A Manifest V3 service worker is stopped whenever it is idle, so there is nowhere else to keep them. tabs: to read the address of the active tab, which is the only way to know which site you are on, and to know its number so a nudge can be drawn in the tab you are actually in. Only the site name survives that read. scripting: to put the nudge card into the page you are reading, while Hawser has a nudge waiting that has not been shown yet. Nothing is put in a page when a page loads, on a schedule, or in the background, and nothing stays behind afterwards. webNavigation: sites like YouTube and Gmail move you to a new page without loading one. Without this, the extension would keep crediting the site you started on. alarms: one timer, once a minute, and everything rides on it rather than on timers of its own. It banks the time you have spent and sends it, it is when the extension asks Hawser whether there is anything to say, it is what gets a waiting nudge onto the page when there was nowhere to draw it a minute ago, and before this browser is connected it is when the extension looks for Hawser again, so opening Hawser after installing this connects it without you pressing anything twice. Access to 127.0.0.1: the Hawser app on your own computer. It is the only address this extension ever contacts. Access to websites, optional: only for drawing that card, and only if you ask for it. It is not granted at install. Your browser asks when you switch the on page nudge on, and unticking that box hands it back. Ordinary web pages only, so files on your own computer are never included. And worth saying plainly, because the permission prompt does not: an access this broad would also let an extension send requests out to those websites. This one sends none. Both of its network requests go to your own computer. Privacy policy: https://gethawser.com/privacy#extension Questions: support@gethawser.com