Linger a While

Every new tab becomes a stargazing sky–stay awhile and hand-drawn stars from around the world come into view.

Linger a While replaces the default new tab with a dark, open sky. At first, nothing happens. The screen remains dim and empty. As you stay on the tab, stars begin to appear. The longer you remain, the more stars emerge. When you leave, they fade back into darkness. Each star is a simple, handmade doodle drawn by someone somewhere in the world, sourced from over 100,000 sketches in the QuickDraw dataset by Google. Linger a While is designed as a counterpoint to the browser’s usual rhythms. New tabs are typically transactional–opened to search, navigate, and move on. This extension does none of that. It offers no utility beyond staying on the page long enough for something to unfold. The experience is temporary by design. The stars exist only while you are there to see them. Linger a While proposes a different relationship to attention–one shaped by duration rather than speed, observation rather than action. It introduces a small pause into the everyday mechanics of browsing: an in-between space where doing less allows more to appear.