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 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. • 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. • 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 is the only pet here that never runs away from you. • 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. 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, and one will come after your cursor until it catches 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 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 account, no sign-in, no tracking, no ads. Desktop Pet does not collect anything, and nothing about your browsing ever leaves your browser. The only thing it stores is your own settings, which pets you picked and what size you like, kept locally by Chrome. It works perfectly well with no internet connection at all. WHAT'S NEW The latest update adds a UFO. Every so often it drops in without warning and drifts around near the top of the page before disappearing again, and most of the time that is the whole event. Every so often, though, it hovers over one of your pets on the ground or in the air and pulls it straight up on a beam of light before flying off. It comes back a little while later and sets the pet down somewhere new on the page, sometimes lowered gently on the beam and sometimes simply dropped from height. There is a separate switch for it in the popup, on by default, for anyone who would rather it never happened. Every existing pet keeps its own behaviour, unchanged. 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