Tabby Cat

Since most of us work with computers on a daily basis, and since most computers have access to the Internet, and since the Internet is probably the best way to get distracted and openheartedly welcome procrastination into your life, there's no wonder that there are tons of tutorials on how to stay clear of distractions while you are working.

If, by contrast, the advice from the aforementioned tutorials do not apply to you and you have a lot of free time, and you want to see cats while you work, then, yes, you will surely want to check out Tabby Cat.

With a very appropriate name, Tabby Cat is a Chrome extension that keeps you entertained with cute, animated felines each time you open a new tab in your browser. As with all Chrome extensions, Tabby Cat can be installed with a simple mouse click from the Chrome Web Store.

As expected, the extension integrates with Chrome's interface and makes its presence known via a typical icon on the right side of the address bar. From this point onward, you can say goodbye to the mundane "New Tab Suggestion Page," as it's now replaced with a cat-friendly environment for your furry friends.

The cats, their thought-provoking names, as well as their environment are all randomly generated, so there's little chance you will get bored. Even though the cats are funny, they are not exactly interactive. You can expect them to blink, to mimic various expressions depicting sadness or happiness, or everything in between, to purr by weirdly vibrating at not very high frequencies and that's kind of about it. If you're lucky, then you might find out that some cats leave various "goodies" which can be later enabled from the shopping bag shaped button from the lower left side of Chrome's window.

The goodies include a few pairs of glasses such as a pair of forever-cool RayBan Clubmasters and Steve Jobs' actual glasses, an impressive collection of versatile head accessories like hats, a crown and even a tiara, and a couple of other, typical cat accessories like a fish skeleton. What's more, if you're even luckier, you will also be able to spot one of the very few little cats that are accompanied by baby cats, which will surely make things even more outstanding.

Before we conclude, since we're nice guys, we're going to let you in on  one trick to collect all the goodies. Open a new tab with an active instance of the extension, hit F12 to enable the built-in Developer Tools module. Locate the "Applications" tab and look for the "Local Storage" section. The extension should be listed under the name "chrome-extension://mefhakmgclhhfbd-bla-bla."

Right-click the 'Goodies" value field, select "Edit Value" and paste the following snippet: {"collected":["glasses-1","glasses-2","glasses-3","glasses-4","hat-1","hat-2","hat-3","hat-4","hat-5","hat-6","hat-7","hat-8","toy-1","toy-2","toy-3","toy-4","toy-5","toy-6","toy-7","toy-8"],"active":{"hat":"hat-8","toy":"toy-3","glasses":"glasses-3"},"unseen":[],"shuffle":false}

Once you're done, refresh the tab, and all the goodies should be at your disposal. We will end this review by saying that it would have been nice if you could interact with the cats more or even if they would at least meow, but that, of course, would have made the extension even more distracting and that is clearly not its purpose. Wait, what is the purpose of Tabby Cat again?