Pronounced like "stay".
Staigh is a local-first Chrome extension designed to make you conscious of where your digital time goes. Instead of relying on abstract cloud services or blocking your favorite websites outright, Staigh focuses on passive awareness, custom daily boundaries, and local-first data integrity.
By tracking only active browser engagement and displaying a real-time countdown widget on pages with active limits, Staigh gives you the friction you need to build better browsing habits without breaking your workflow.
Most time trackers count hours simply because a tab is open in the background. Staigh uses window-focus state listeners and idle detection thresholds. If you walk away from your desk for more than sixty seconds, or switch to a different application, the timer pauses automatically. It only counts the time you actually spend looking at and interacting with a page.
When you set a daily limit for a domain, Staigh injects a sleek, draggable countdown clock directly onto the page.
- It ticks down in real-time, updating every second.
- It remains completely isolated inside a Shadow DOM, meaning the website's CSS cannot distort its styling or layout.
- The widget can be dragged anywhere on the screen, and it automatically remembers its position across page reloads.
- The border turns yellow when you have under five minutes remaining, and pulses red with a "Time's Up!" notification once the limit expires.
- Snooze Option: When the timer reaches the warning phase (under 5 minutes) or is fully expired, a Snooze button appears on the widget. Clicking it adds 10 minutes to your daily allowance (maximum 3 times per day) and resumes ticking.
Manage your tracking configurations instantly without opening the dashboard. Click the extension toolbar icon to open the popup:
- View today's total active tracking time and your top 4 most-visited sites.
- Ignore Site: Quick-block the active site by adding it to the blocklist.
- Set/Edit Limit: Configure or adjust the active website's daily time limit directly via an inline popup modal form.
- Unblock Site: Instantly remove the active site from the blocklist if it's currently excluded.
To make configuration faster and easier, suggestion strips are rendered below the forms on the Blocklist and Daily Limits tabs. These strips show the top 3-4 most-visited, untracked/unlimited domains for today. Clicking a suggestion tag instantly pre-populates the input fields.
The analytical dashboard provides a visual breakdown of your daily activity:
- Daily trend graphs (Recharts Bar chart) and distribution breakdown (Recharts Pie chart) styled with theme-adaptive Carbon-Bento color tokens.
- Domain Filter: A dropdown next to the Activity Trend chart allows you to filter historical bar graphs by specific domains, letting you drill down into individual site history.
- Setting hours and minutes is separated into clean input fields, compiling the total daily limit on the fly.
- When configuring a domain that already has a limit, the action copy changes automatically to Update Limit instead of "Set Limit".
- Custom confirmation modal overlays protect against accidental deletions of blocklist items or limits, avoiding unstyled browser alerts.
The interface comes with responsive Light and Dark themes. Toggling the theme from the popup or the dashboard instantly updates all active interfaces, including any currently visible countdown widgets on webpage tabs.
Staigh does not send your browsing history to external servers. Configuration settings are stored in local extension storage, while high-volume time logs are saved in IndexedDB. You can export a JSON backup of your records or wipe the database clean at any time. The Data & Backup page handles messaging smartly with auto-clearing, contextual success and error message boxes.
Since Staigh is currently in development, you can load it as an unpacked extension in Google Chrome.
- Download the latest
staigh-extension.zipfile from the Releases page on GitHub. - Extract the zip archive to a local folder on your computer.
- Open Google Chrome and navigate to
chrome://extensions/. - Enable "Developer mode" using the toggle in the top-right corner.
- Click "Load unpacked" in the top-left corner and select the extracted folder.
If you want to compile the project yourself:
- Clone or download this repository.
- Install dependencies and compile the code from the root directory:
npm install npm run build
- Open Google Chrome and navigate to
chrome://extensions/. - Enable "Developer mode" using the toggle in the top-right corner.
- Click "Load unpacked" in the top-left corner and select the compiled
distfolder.
Click the Staigh icon in your toolbar to view the quick popup. From here, you can see your total active time for the day, review your top four most-visited sites, temporarily pause or resume tracking globally, and perform quick block/limit adjustments on the active page.
- Open the dashboard by clicking "View Dashboard" in the popup footer, or by right-clicking the extension icon and selecting "Options".
- Navigate to the "Daily Limits" tab.
- Select a domain from the Suggestions strip, or enter the domain name and specify the maximum allowance in hours and minutes.
- Click Set Limit (or Update Limit if it already exists). The injected countdown widget will appear on that website during your next visit.
If you do not want to record time spent on local development environments or search engines, go to the "Blocklist" tab in the dashboard, click a tag from the Suggestions list, or enter the domain name manually, and click Exclude Domain. Staigh will ignore them completely.
Under the "Data & Backup" tab, you can export your entire tracking history and settings to a JSON file. If you ever want to start fresh, you can use the factory reset option, which prompts you with a custom confirmation screen before permanently wiping your IndexedDB store.
We welcome contributions to Staigh. Please read our Contributing Guide to understand the codebase architecture, setup instructions, and coding standards.
Staigh is open-source software licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for the full license text.