IBrowse

GIF
YouTube Example
Dashboard View
Chrome Extension
Architecture Diagram
Wikipedia Example

Inspiration

Your browsing experience should adapt to you! Not the other way around. The modern web is designed for scale and attention, not for individual experience. Pages are often cluttered, distracting, and overwhelming, forcing users to adapt to interfaces that were never built around their intent. Whether someone wants to focus, learn, simplify information, or engage with content more naturally, today’s browser experience is mostly static and one-size-fits-all.

We were inspired by the idea that interacting with the web should feel more adaptive. Instead of treating webpages as fixed environments, we wanted to explore what happens when users can reshape them in real time based on what they need. That idea sits at the intersection of technology and storytelling: transforming browsing into an interactive experience where the interface responds to the user’s goals.

IBrowse is a way to turn the browser into a dynamic, personalized medium for focus, accessibility, and meaningful interaction.

What it does

IBrowse turns the browser into an adaptive media layer. Through the Chrome extension, users can reshape the page they are viewing in real time: removing distracting elements, hiding clutter, modifying layout and styling, and even adding new content directly into the DOM. The result is a browsing experience that feels personalized, interactive, and responsive to user intent. The product supports both quick preset modes, and more flexible voice-driven interaction, allowing users to engage with the web in a more natural and conversational way.

Rather than forcing people to adapt to static interfaces, IBrowse adapts the interface to the person. Transformations persist across refreshes, so the experience feels continuous, and the connected dashboard gives users visibility into how their browsing environment is being transformed over time. With Supabase- and Auth0-powered dashboard infrastructure and ElevenLabs voice integration, IBrowse reimagines the web surfing experience as something user-shaped: a more meaningful way to interact with digital content.

How we built it

We built IBrowse as a Chrome extension frontend, a Python backend, and a React dashboard. The extension side panel and dashboard were built with JavaScript, React, and Vite, while the browser-side content script uses JavaScript to inspect and manipulate the live DOM on any supported webpage. That content script is responsible for applying the actual transformations in real time, including hiding elements, removing components, restyling sections of the page, and injecting new content.

On the backend, we used FastAPI in Python to handle transform requests coming from the extension. The extension captures a structured snapshot of the current page, sends that data to the backend, and the backend returns structured DOM transformation operations that the content script can safely apply. For voice-based interaction, we integrated ElevenLabs so users can interact with the browser agent more naturally. To support persistence, analytics, and user visibility, we connected the system to Supabase and Auth0 for dashboard data and identity infrastructure. The dashboard itself is a React-based web app that reads transformation data and surfaces it through a polished interface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

IBrowse works especially well on content heavy websites like YouTube, where users often want to quickly filter, clean up, or reshape what they are seeing. We also found some more unconventional use cases while building it, like pulling up YouTube video transcripts and having the agent extract useful insights from the content of the video. That opens up interesting possibilities for studying or quickly understanding long-form videos without having to manually dig through everything.

One area we spent a lot of time on was integrating ElevenLabs for voice commands. That turned out to be more difficult than expected because their APIs do not plug cleanly into the Google Chrome extension environment. Even so, we were able to get a rudimentary version of the voice-command flow working, which gave us a strong foundation for making IBrowse feel more conversational in the future.

What's next for IBrowse

One challenge is that webpage changes are highly dynamic, so it’s not easy to neatly standardize and display everything a user removes or adds across different sites. In the future, we want to build session timelines that let users to review their past transformations and revert DOM changes to earlier versions when needed. We also see a lot of room to expand IBrowse into more specialized use cases. Some ideas that come to mind including web scraping, color-blind accessibility support, and content filtering for children. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Because the core system is flexible, it can grow intothese directions naturally, which makes the long-term value of the product clear. The working version of the extension is pending approval for publication.