15 years of right-click search.
One person, three browsers, still shipping.
Simple = Select + Search started as a Chrome extension to scratch one itch: searching the thing I just highlighted without opening a tab and re-typing it — ideally from the couch, without reaching for the keyboard. It became infrastructure for the kind of people who keep 60 tabs open or search across hundreds of sites. This is how it got here.
How it got here.
Right-click search hits the Chrome Web Store.
originBuilt on a couch, shipped from a frustration: too many steps between selecting text and searching it. Chrome Web Store, day one, zero users. The context menu finally did what it should have always done.
Fan-out: search all engines at once.
featureA user named Jon suggested sending one selection to every engine simultaneously — "Search on all!" shipped in a weekend. It became the feature people mention in reviews to this day.
Manifest V2: first of many platform rewrites.
milestoneGoogle required all extensions to move to MV2 — code separation, encrypted external connections, no legacy hacks. First encounter with Chrome's habit of rewriting the rules mid-game.
Source code published on GitHub.
milestoneA user suggested it, so we put the code on GitHub. Community PRs and feature requests started arriving within days; someone immediately asked for link grouping — which landed the following year in v0.4.
Groups ship: organise engines into submenus.
featureContext-menu subgroups let you collapse related engines into nested submenus — the most-requested feature of the era, and still core to how power users keep dozens of engines tidy. (It grew into the nested Sets of v3.)
Microsoft Edge Add-ons: third browser, no extra weekend.
browserAdded to Edge Add-ons; the existing Chrome build worked with minimal changes. Three stores, one codebase.
Back after a long pause.
featureAfter a six-year feature freeze, "search everywhere" results can now open in a new window. Small change — but it broke the silence and restarted active development.
Manifest V3: ripped out AngularJS, rebuilt in React.
milestoneGoogle mandated MV3 by June 2024. Two months of evenings to rewrite in React and redesign config storage with multi-device sync. Followed by three months of bug reports from users whose migration silently failed.
Firefox Add-ons: 13 years in, a second browser.
browserLaunched on addons.mozilla.org alongside the Browser API swap that made cross-browser compatibility real. Chrome, Firefox, Edge — all three in one release cycle.
v3 redesign · Sets ship.
nowFull TypeScript rewrite, new design system, Console aesthetic, and Sets (grouped engines) for free. Pro follows in Q3 — the side panel and browser sync arrive with it.
About the maintainer.
I built this sitting on a couch in 2011 because I was tired of copy-pasting into search bars. Fifteen years later I’m still the only person maintaining it, which either says something about dedication or a concerning inability to let things go. Pro is what keeps it sustainable.