Mogged into building a Chrome extension (Replacing 'Search with Google' with Claude)

Costa Fotiadis

Costa Fotiadis

— 2 min read
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Mogged into building a Chrome extension (Replacing 'Search with Google' with Claude)

Scrolling the fever dream called Twitter, I came across this sentence:

"Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him"

(frame mogged: physically dominated by someone with a superior physique, apparently)

None of those words are in the bible. I could have Googled it. Instead, I did what any reasonable person would do and built a Chrome extension.

Housekeeping

Code is on GitHub if you want to skip the post entirely.

CTA Image

Download zip → chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → point to extracted folder

Releases

(slightly shortened snippets below for brevity)

TL;DR

A Chrome extension that adds Ask Claude to the right-click menu. Select any text, right-click, and it opens Claude with enough context to maybe give a useful answer.

Three files

No build step, no npm install, no framework. Caveman. 🧌

{
  "manifest_version": 3,
  "name": "Ask Claude",
  "version": "1.0",
  "description": "Right-click selected text to ask Claude",
  "permissions": ["contextMenus"],
  "background": {
    "service_worker": "background.js"
  },
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": ["https://claude.ai/*"],
      "js": ["content.js"]
    }
  ]
}

manifest.json

The context menu entry gets created on install. When it's clicked, it builds a prompt with the selected text and sends it to Claude.

chrome.contextMenus.onClicked.addListener((info) => {
  if (info.menuItemId !== "askClaude") return;
  const text = `I selected "${info.selectionText}" on my browser\n\nI would normally Google this. Tell me what I need to know.`;
  chrome.tabs.create({ url: `https://claude.ai/new?q=${encodeURIComponent(text)}` });
});

background.js

The actual prompt ended up being:

I selected "X". I would normally Google this. Tell me what I need to know.

It's not much – but it's definitely better than sending "GitHub" and getting "What's up with GitHub? What are you trying to do?" — which is exactly what happened on my first few attempts. 😭

The last piece is a content script that auto-submits once the page loads, because clicking Send manually is way too much effort.

const params = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
if (params.get("q")) {
  const trySend = setInterval(() => {
    const button = document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Send message"]');
    if (button && !button.disabled) {
      button.click();
      clearInterval(trySend);
    }
  }, 200);
  setTimeout(() => clearInterval(trySend), 5000);
}

content.js

The interval polling isn't pretty, but Claude's UI takes a moment to render the button — a simple querySelector on load would fire too early.

Loading it

chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → point to root of project. Done.

Anyways

Studies show that readers who don't click the 🍺 button below, are 73% more likely to get frame mogged at their local ASU frat party. Don't let this happen to you.

@markasduplicate

Later

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