I Built a Chrome Extension Because I Was Bored 🙂
I love fonts. Probably more than I should. When I’m at a restaurant, I’m more critical of the menu design and font choices than I am of the menu itself. I do it all the time.
One of my favorite SNL skits is Papyrus with Ryan Gosling. I still quote it all the time.
So when I was bored last month, I wanted to see if I could make something using Claude. So I made a Chrome Extension called Font Finder, and it does exactly that.
Click the icon, and see every font on the page. That’s it.
It’s pretty dumb lol, but I like it.
Why I Built It
I run an SEO agency, which means I spend a weird amount of time looking at other people’s websites. Whether it’s competitor research, inspiration hunting, or auditing a client’s site, I’m constantly opening pages and wondering what fonts they’re using. The traditional way to find this out is to right-click, hit Inspect, dig through the CSS, find the font-family declaration, and read it off. It works, but it’s six clicks too many.
I’d been wanting to learn how Chrome extensions work for a while. So one weekend, I decided to actually do it. The whole thing took me an afternoon.
What It Actually Does
You click the extension icon, and it scans whatever page you’re on. Then it shows you every font family being used, rendered in its actual typeface so you can see what it looks like.
It also shows you the font weights — so you can tell if a site is using Regular, SemiBold, Bold, or a mix. And it pulls out the colors used with that font, displayed as swatches you can click to copy the hex code.
That last bit was actually the feature I added second, after using my own extension for a few days and realizing “wait, I want to grab the colors too.”
Things I Learned Building It
Chrome extensions are way easier than I thought. The whole thing is basically HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JavaScript. If you can build a webpage, you can build an extension.
The hard part wasn’t the code; it was getting it published. Every browser store has its own quirks. Opera wanted a persona.ini file I’d never heard of. Firefox needed a data_collection_permissions field buried in the manifest. Chrome made me verify my business with Dun & Bradstreet, which apparently still listed me as “out of business” from years ago.
But once you fight through that, you end up with your tool living in actual browser stores where real people can install it. Which is kind of cool.
Who It’s For
Honestly, anyone who looks at websites and thinks about how they’re built:
- Designers doing typography research
- Developers are debugging fonts faster
- SEO folks are auditing site consistency
- Marketers stalking competitors (we all do it)
Or just people like me who get curious about what font that one website is using and want to know in three seconds instead of three minutes.
Try It
It’s free. No sign-up. No tracking. No catch.
Get it on the Chrome Web Store →
It’s also on Firefox and Opera if that’s more your style. I’ll add Edge soon, once Microsoft finishes verifying my business for the third time.
If you do try it, let me know what you think. And if there’s a feature you want, tell me — I might actually build it.
