TimeTrack — a privacy-first browsing-time tracker
A modern Chrome extension that measures how much active time you spend on each
website — a privacy-first, local-first alternative to Webtime Tracker, with deep
analytics, goals, cloud backup, and data export.
🌐 Website ·
📋 Changelog ·
🔒 Privacy Policy
All data stays local on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you
explicitly enable cloud backup.
✨ Features
- Smart, automatic tracking — counts only active time: window focused and
you're not idle. Optionally keep counting while background audio plays.
- Modern design — dark/light/auto themes, full RTL support, smooth
hand-rolled charts.
- Rich dashboard with 4 tabs:
- Overview — summary cards (today / range / average / focus score /
streak), a trend chart over time, category breakdown, and top sites.
- Sites — a searchable, sortable table with time, visits, share, and a
per-site limit; pin sites to the top, and search all history, not
just the selected range.
- Smart insights — a weekday × hour heatmap, hourly distribution,
productive vs. distracting time, and your busiest hour.
- Settings — full control, with a settings search box to find
anything fast.
- Smart categories — automatic site classification (productivity, social
media, entertainment, news, and more) + a 0–100 focus score. Every
classification is editable.
- Focus mode (Pomodoro) — work→break cycles that block distracting sites,
an "allow-list" mode (block everything except what you allow), long
breaks every few cycles, block/allow by specific domain (not just
category), and keyboard shortcuts (Alt+Shift+F).
- Untracked sites — a list of sites that are never counted, managed from
Settings or straight from a site's detail view ("Don't track this site"),
where you can also merge history between domains (e.g. when a site
rebrands) and see first/last visit.
- Automated insights — "Social media up 30% from last week", your busiest
day, and more.
- CSV import & real site icons (optional) — a migration path from other
trackers.
- Goals & limits — a daily time limit, a per-site limit, daily and weekly
goals, an 80%-approaching warning before the over-limit alert (with a
1-hour snooze button on the notification itself), and an automatic weekly
summary.
- Period comparison & site detail — this week vs. last week, and clicking a
site opens a daily timeline plus an hourly breakdown (that site's peak
hours).
- Custom date ranges — alongside the quick ranges (today / 7 / 30 / 90 /
all).
- Encrypted cloud backup — sync to Google or a custom server (HTTPS), with
optional AES-256 passphrase encryption (zero-knowledge, with a passphrase
strength meter), and a preview before restoring (day range, total time,
site count) so you never restore blind.
- Export/import — JSON (full backup) and CSV (everything, or just the
current view).
- Six languages — Hebrew, English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and French,
with live switching.
- Privacy — no host permissions, no external tracking, no involuntary
network calls (icons are generated locally), automatic deletion of old data.
- Weekly category budgets — cap the time per category each week, with progress bars on the Overview and 80% / 100% notifications.
- More analytics — a weekly focus-score trend with your best week, a goal-met streak, and a comparison of any two date ranges with the biggest per-site changes.
- Smarter focus sessions — scheduled auto-start, a strict mode with no early exit, a "pause for 10 minutes" option on the block page, and a session history.
- Optional session log — off by default: record each visit's start and length to see how long your visits to a site last. It stays on your device.
- Built for large histories — thousands of sites render instantly; select many at once to categorize, limit, pin, or stop tracking them in one go.
- Flexible CSV import & demo data — import TimeTrack or RescueTime-style CSVs, or try the dashboard on demo data you can remove with one click.
- Accessible — keyboard navigation, screen-reader labels and AA text contrast, checked automatically with axe-core.
🚀 Installation
Since the extension isn't in the Chrome Web Store yet, install it in developer
mode:
- Open
chrome://extensions
- Enable Developer mode (top-right corner)
- Click Load unpacked
- Select the
extension/ folder (this is the folder loaded/uploaded to
the store)
- Pin the extension to your toolbar — and start browsing 🎉
Clicking the icon opens a quick popup; the "Open full dashboard" button opens
the dashboard.
☁️ Setting up cloud backup
- Google Sync — enable "Sync to Google account" in Settings. Data backs up
automatically through Chrome's own sync mechanism (capped at ~100KB; oldest
days are trimmed if needed, but your local data stays complete).
- Custom server — enter a URL (and optional token) for an endpoint you
control; the extension
POSTs the full backup to it.
- File — you can always export JSON/CSV manually and save it wherever you
like.
🔧 Development
No build step, no extension dependencies — pure modular JavaScript. Dev tooling lives in dist (unit, integration, real-browser and accessibility tests, plus a type-check):
cd dist
pnpm test # unit + integration tests (no browser needed)
pnpm install # dev tooling: Puppeteer, TypeScript, axe-core
pnpm typecheck # tsc --checkJs over the extension
pnpm exec puppeteer browsers install chrome # one-time: download Chrome for Testing
pnpm test:e2e # real-browser tests
pwsh build.ps1 # builds the upload zip from extension/
For architecture, the data model, and a full file map, see CLAUDE.md; to contribute (or add a language), see CONTRIBUTING.md.
📁 Structure
extension/ ← the shippable extension (load/upload this folder)
manifest.json — extension config (MV3)
_locales/ — name, description and shortcut labels per language (Web Store listing)
background.js — the tracking engine (service worker)
src/lib/ — shared logic (storage, stats, charts, backup, crypto, i18n)
src/lib/locales/ — UI languages (JSON, one file each)
src/popup/ — the quick popup
src/dashboard/ — the full dashboard
src/blocked/ — the focus-mode block page
icons/ — icons
store-assets/ ← store assets: privacy policy, listing copy, images
site/ — marketing website source (published to GitHub Pages)
dist/ ← dev tooling: tests, package.json, build.ps1, and the built zip
archive/ ← superseded assets (old images/build versions)
🔒 Permissions and why they're needed
| Permission | Use |
|---|
storage / unlimitedStorage | Store time data and settings locally |
tabs | Identify the active tab's domain |
idle | Stop counting while you're inactive |
alarms | Periodic saving and automatic backup |
notifications | Alerts for time limits |
favicon (optional) | Real site icons from Chrome's local cache — only if manually enabled |
No host permission, and no access to page content — only the domain name.
