Browser Buddies

Browser Buddies is a chrome extension that allows users to share their tabs and bookmarks to increase productivity.

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Inspiration

Browser Buddies was inspired by the hassle that is sharing webpages with your friends or coworkers. Copying the URL, then pasting it and sending a message in a third-party app is such a long process for a very basic and frequent task. We thought it would be way more convenient to be able to share websites in just a few clicks, with no third-party apps involved.

What it does

Browser Buddies is a full stack chrome extension that allows users to seamlessly share the name and URL of the tab they are currently viewing, as well as the names and URLs of their bookmarks. All you need to do to send your tab or bookmark is click the extension, and then click the appropriate button.

How we built it

Browser Buddies was centered around the Google Cloud Platform App Engine running a node back end, with the javascript based chrome extension front end communicating back to the GCP hosted server.

This was a great opportunity for us to learn the quirks of Google's GCP and so we jumped at the chance to use the free cloud credits given to us!

Challenges we ran into

A challenge that repeatedly came up was formatting our data properly to send to/from the server. Other challenges we ran into included learning the quirks of chrome extensions and Google cloud platform, and how to debug them. The biggest challenge we ran into, however, was properly communicating what we wanted the software to be, and who should do what work. None of us have been to a hackathon before, so building our own software from the ground up and communicating to each other was quite foreign to us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact that we created a piece of software we feel is actually useful. All of our team members feel that we could benefit from having this extension in our browsers.

What we learned

We were all quite rusty in web development, so we all relearned how to do that. We also learned how to make a chrome extension, and how to use Google cloud platform. Perhaps most importantly though, we learned the importance of planning out our software, delegating work, and constant communication.

What's next for Browser Buddies

There are a lot of features we thought of, but did not have time to implement. Such features include having separate groups that can see each other's tabs/bookmarks, real-time updating, and the ability to upload all tabs at once instead of one at a time.

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