#DHSeaDev — Chrome MV3 — Side Panel Extension
Backtrack
A visual history of the pages you move through. Some things are two screens back — Backtrack keeps a picture of each one, so you can look back a step or ten without losing your place.
Field Guide
You picked a county, moved on to parties, then documents — and now you need to check what you selected three screens ago. Ordinary browser history cannot help, because a multi-step form never changes its address. Every step lives at the same URL, and the back button throws away the work.
Backtrack captures each screen as it looked when you left it, including the values you had entered. Screens are captioned by the heading you actually read on the page rather than a page title that never varies, and summarised by the fields you filled in — so a strip of thumbnails reads as Step 1 — Court · Polk · CVCV099887 instead of four identical rows. Name a session, add a note to any screen, and search the lot: page text, form values, and your own notes, across every site at once.
What it never photographs
Detection runs before any capture, and reaches into same-origin frames and open shadow roots — because a screenshot shows those too. A skipped page still appears in your history with the reason, so a gap is always explained rather than mysterious.
- PASSWORDSAny visible password field — plus new-password and one-time-code inputs
- PAYMENTCard number, CVV, expiry, routing and account details — including fields rendered inside a payment provider’s own frame, where the value is hidden from the extension but plainly visible in a screenshot
- SIGN-ONLogin, registration, SSO and checkout pages — matched by address and by the content of the form
- IDENTITYDates of birth and government identifiers — DOB, SSN, ITIN and similar, whether typed into a box or simply printed on a record
- YOUR RULESAnything you add yourself — text or address patterns, wildcards or regular expressions, each with its own label
What it does
Captures On Settle
There is no reliable hook for “just before you navigate away”, so Backtrack keeps the current screen’s frame continuously up to date instead. When you leave, the stored frame already reflects the filled-in state — and entering a value then immediately clicking Next never loses it.
Works Where History Cannot
A postback wizard changes its whole form without changing its URL. Backtrack detects a new screen from the page’s structure — headings, form controls, landmarks — not from the address bar, so every step of a filing gets its own frame.
Three Ways To Record
Only the sites you switch on, every site at once, or everything for the next hour when you need a continuous record. The temporary mode expires by itself and never changes your standing preference. Pause any time, and pause outranks everything.
Named Sessions and Notes
Rename a session to what it actually was, and leave a note on the screen that matters — error introduced here, wrong county. Notes are searchable and travel with any package you export. This is what turns a pile of screenshots into a record.
Packaging
Hand any period or any session over as a single zip: the screenshots, a spreadsheet index, and an offline viewer that opens straight from the folder with no extension needed. Skipped screens are listed with their reason and no image.
Health You Can See
A quiet recorder and a broken one look identical, so Backtrack reports capture success rate, why screens were skipped, storage by site, recent faults, and a one-click capture self-test.
Tiered Retention
Full images for a short window, thumbnails and searchable text for far longer, and a disk ceiling that applies even at “no age limit”. Pin a session to exempt it. A long searchable record costs a fraction of a long visual one.
A Child Lock, Honestly Labelled
Optional and off by default: a short code that guards the settings page against accidental changes. It is not security, and the interface says so — your recorded screens live in this browser profile and stay readable by anyone who can use the computer.
Quiet By Design
Capture is visually silent: a 60 fps recording of the actual screen framebuffer showed zero pixels changing across six captures, against a deliberate control flash the same method caught easily.
Under the Hood
Backtrack is gated by eleven automated suites — 267 assertions: unit suites over the capture pipeline and storage, a jsdom suite over the content script, and live Chromium suites that drive the real extension against real sites and against a local multi-step form. A sensitive-surface matrix of forty-one cases covers every skip category and, just as importantly, the false-positive controls — an attorney named Dobson, prose about the social security system, and an ordinary case number all still record normally.
Most of what those suites catch could not have been found any other way. A stored screenshot of an SSN survived on disk because suppression was being rate-limited alongside capture. The whole recorder deadlocked silently because a blocked IndexedDB upgrade has no handler and simply never settles. A four-step wizard was misclassified as an infinite feed and recorded once. A page glanced at for a second was never recorded at all. Each is now a permanent test, and the storage layer surfaces faults in the interface rather than swallowing them — because a recorder that has quietly stopped recording is worse than one that says so.
Built, tested, and packaged, with the store listing and assets prepared. The install link lands here once it clears review.
Privacy Policy
Backtrack does not collect, transmit, or receive your data. Everything it captures stays in your browser’s local storage on your own device. There is no server, no account, no analytics, and no third party. The developer cannot see your captures and has no mechanism to obtain them.
What Backtrack stores
When you enable recording for a website, Backtrack stores locally: screenshots of pages on that site; visible page text and form field values, so your history is searchable; the page URL, title and timestamp; any notes or session names you add; and your settings, including enabled sites and your own skip rules.
Where it is stored
In your browser’s IndexedDB, on your device. It is not uploaded anywhere. If you use Chrome profile sync, this data is not included — extension IndexedDB does not sync.
What is never captured
- Any site you have not enabled. Recording is off by default everywhere; you may switch to recording every site, in which case only the sites you exclude are left out.
- Any page showing a password, login, or one-time-code field.
- Any page showing payment or card fields — card number, CVV, expiry, bank or routing details — including fields rendered inside a payment provider’s own frame.
- Sign-on, registration, SSO and checkout pages, matched both by address and by the content of the form.
- Any page showing or requesting a date of birth or a government identifier — DOB, SSN, ITIN, tax ID and similar — whether typed into a field or simply printed on the page, as it is on many records.
- Any page matching a skip rule you have added yourself.
- On any page Backtrack does capture, the value of a password, payment or identity field is never written to the searchable text index.
- Backtrack does not run in Incognito windows at all — recording private browsing into permanent storage would defeat the point of it.
All of these are skipped automatically. A placeholder entry is recorded in their place, so your history has no unexplained gaps.
What the developer receives
Nothing. There is no telemetry, no crash reporting, no usage statistics, no remote error logging, and no advertising or tracking code of any kind. Backtrack makes no network requests, and loads no remote scripts, styles or fonts.
Your control
- Enable or disable recording per site at any time, or pause everything for a set period.
- Delete individual frames, whole sessions, or everything.
- Set retention from 1 day to no age limit, with a disk ceiling that applies at every setting.
- Package any period or session as a zip, and restore one later.
- Uninstalling removes all stored data permanently.
Data retention
Captures are deleted automatically according to your retention setting. A storage ceiling also applies at every setting; when it is reached, the oldest unpinned material is removed first. Deleted data is not recoverable.
Your responsibility
Because your captures live on your device and never leave it, protecting them is your responsibility. Anyone with access to your unlocked computer and browser profile can view them. If you record sites containing sensitive information, consider a shorter retention window and be aware of who can access your device. Sensitive-page detection is deliberately over-inclusive, so some ordinary pages will be skipped; it cannot guarantee that every sensitive page is caught.
Children
Backtrack is not directed at children under 13. No data is collected from anyone.
Changes
Material changes will be noted in the extension’s release notes and on this page. Because no data is collected, a change cannot retroactively affect information already gathered — there is none.
Contact: dhseadev@gmail.com