Productive without installing anything
Three browser extensions for the places where you cannot install software and cannot send the text anywhere
[Almost Ad] This one is about the extensions, which I make. siamand.cc/extensions ↗
Anyone who has worked inside a large company knows the shape of this problem.
You need a small utility. A translator for a document in a language you do not read. A way to blank out account numbers before you paste a screenshot into a ticket. A scrap of script you run on an internal page twenty times a day.
So you look for software, and you hit the wall. You cannot install it, because installing software needs an approval. The approval needs a security review. The review needs a vendor assessment. And even if all of that completes, half those utilities work by sending your text to someone else’s server, which is exactly the thing your compliance policy exists to prevent.
The work is small. The process around it is not.
I kept hitting that wall, so I built three browser extensions that do their work locally.
Translating without sending the text anywhere
Swift Translator translates selected text in the page you are reading, using the translation model built into the browser itself. The text does not leave your machine, because there is no service behind it to send it to.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is the difference between a tool you can use on an internal document and one you cannot.
Redacting before you share
Redact and Snap takes a screenshot and lets you paint over the parts that should not travel with it, before the image exists anywhere else.
It exists because the usual sequence is wrong. Most people screenshot first, paste into some editor, blur, then share. The unredacted image sits in a clipboard, a temp folder, and often a cloud sync, before the careful part happens. Doing the redaction as part of the capture closes that window.
Running your own scripts without a console
dev-probe is a sidebar that holds the small scripts you keep pasting into the developer console. Grab the auth token. Clear the storage. Dump the page state so you can read it.
Each one becomes a widget with a button. Run it, copy what it returns, or show the result in the sidebar. The scripts run in the page’s own context, they stay on your machine, and the library is a JSON file you can export and hand to a teammate.
Why this shape of tool
A browser extension is not inherently safe, and I would not claim otherwise. It can read pages, and you should check what any of them do before trusting it.
But it has three properties that matter in a regulated environment, and they are properties of the shape rather than of my code.
- Nothing is installed on the machine. The extension lives in the browser profile, which is usually already governed and already approved.
- Nothing has to leave the network. The work happens in the tab, and you can verify that by watching the network panel while you use it.
- Nothing needs an account. There is no vendor relationship to assess, because there is no vendor sitting between you and your own data.
That combination is why I keep reaching for extensions rather than applications for this class of problem. Not because they are more powerful. Because they are the only tools that can get through the door.
The honest caveats
Browser built-in features vary between versions, so a capability can appear and disappear under you. An extension can be disabled by policy without warning. And a sidebar full of scripts is a sharp object: a script you did not read can do whatever the page can do.
None of that changes the basic trade. For the small jobs that sit between a real application and a manual workaround, a local extension is usually the fastest way from a problem to it being solved.