Highlight by Máximo G

Highlight marks the words you are watching for, on any page, in the colours you choose.

I built it because I kept scanning the same pages for the same handful of words, over and over. The slow part was never the thinking — it was the looking. Highlight takes the mechanical part and leaves the judgement to you.

What it does

• Word lists. Group the words you care about, give each list its own colour, text style and background opacity, and Highlight marks every match as the page loads — including content that arrives late. End a word with * to catch every ending: invoic* finds invoice, invoices and invoicing. A small ↓3 on a list's row jumps straight to its first match on the page.
• Temporary highlights. Right-click any selection and mark it on every page in a colour from your own palette, or press Alt+Shift+H for a small picker right under the selection. Ten colours to start, styles that combine freely, and 20 at once by default — or 10 to 100, or no limit. They end when you close the browser unless you choose to keep them, and any one can be saved as a list. On Firefox for Android, add one from the popup.
• Timed pause. Pause highlighting for 30 minutes, an hour or until tomorrow. The toolbar badge counts down, and highlighting comes back by itself.
• Combination rules. Fire only when several things appear together on the same page, so a single common word stops shouting on its own. A combination rule can carry a tooltip, a notification and a link of its own — on every word in the rule, or on one word you pick — live only while the rule is actually met.
• Pattern rules. Match by shape rather than by word — case numbers, dates, amounts, reference codes — using regular expressions, with a tester built in.
• Word rules. Per-word behaviour when a whole list is too blunt: its own tooltip, its own link, its own notification, its own scope.
• Links. Any list or rule can make its matches clickable, opening where you choose — new tab, same tab, new window, private window. A small marker can show the word is clickable before you click it.
• Tooltips. Attach a note to a word or a rule and it shows on hover, so the match carries its own context. Each themed tooltip matches the notification style of the same name.
• Notifications. Get told when something matches, with your own title and the matched text as the copyable body, plus a sound if you want one. Choose how many show at once and the rest wait their turn. Pick a style from a live preview: five were redesigned with a little motion, which stays still if your system asks for reduced motion.
• Folders and scoping. Organise lists into folders, and restrict or exclude any list by site or page so it stays quiet where it should.
• Two reports. The inactivity report shows what has gone quiet and is worth cleaning up. The activity report shows what fires on the most pages, so you can find what is making too much noise. Both export to Excel.
• Matching that fits your language. Fuzzy matching catches near-miss spellings at three sensitivities, off by default and switchable per list. A word typed without accents already finds its accented forms, and a list option makes it work both ways. Phrases still match when the page breaks them across lines.
• Presets, themes and density. Seventeen ready-made colour themes, light and dark, and a compact mode. A preset changes colours only — your font, type scale, letter spacing, corner radius, border width and shadow stay exactly as you set them.
• Backup. Export and import your whole configuration, or just the parts you pick.

The popup is available in English, Spanish and Lithuanian.

Your data

Highlight has no server of mine and no analytics inside it. Your lists, rules and settings are stored by your browser. With sync on — the default — they are kept in your own Firefox account so they follow you between computers; anything too large to sync stays on the device and is marked "local only". Turn sync off in Settings → Backup and everything returns to the device. Either way, nothing reaches me.

Temporary highlights stay on the device and are erased when you close the browser, unless you turn on "Keep them when the browser restarts". Their colour palette follows sync like your other settings.

Page content is read in your browser to find matches and is never sent anywhere.

To erase everything, Settings → Backup → "Delete all my data" wipes every list, folder, rule, preset, temporary highlight and setting from the device and from your account, behind a confirmation. Because I never receive a copy, that button is the whole deletion path — there is nothing for me to delete on your behalf.

The website is separate from the extension and uses Google Analytics to count page visits. The extension itself does not.

Permissions

• storage — to save your lists, rules and settings.
• contextMenus — for the right-click actions, including the colour menu for temporary highlights.
• notifications — for match alerts in the browser's own style, only if you choose it.
• alarms — so a timed pause ends by itself and the toolbar badge can count down to it.
• access to the pages you visit — to read page text in your browser and mark the matches.

Who made it

A personal project, built and maintained independently, unaffiliated with any employer. It is free, there is no paid tier, and there is no company behind it. If something behaves wrong, tell me the specific thing and I will fix that specific thing.