Interactive Previews - browser extension

Interactive Previews is a modern browser extension designed to increase web browsing efficiency. Instead of constantly clicking links to view images or download PDF files, this extension allows you to instantly preview them by simply hovering your mouse cursor over the link.

🎓 This repository contains the source code and documentation for my Bachelor Thesis at the University of Pardubice - Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics.

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✨ Key Features

• 🖼️ Instant Image Previews: Automatically finds and displays the highest resolution image available using srcset and sizes. Supports various formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG, AVIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF).
• 📄 Native PDF Rendering: Integrated PDF.js library allows rendering multi-page PDF documents securely without downloading them locally.
• ℹ️ Customizable Info Bar: Displays metadata like image dimensions, file size, MIME type, and PDF page counts, with fully configurable visibility and ordering.
• ⚙️ Granular Control:
  • Master toggles to independently enable/disable Image or PDF previews.
  • Smart Triggers: Configure hover delays or require modifier keys (Shift, Ctrl, Alt).
  • Enable or disable the extension on specific domains (Blocklist/Allowlist) with full Regular Expression (Regex) support.
• 🚀 Performance Optimized: Built with Manifest V3, utilizing Service Workers and asynchronous Fetch API.

📥 Installation

🚀 Recommended: Chrome Web Store

The easiest way to install the extension is directly from the Chrome Web Store (with automatic background updates):

👉 Install Interactive Previews from Chrome Web Store

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🛠️ Manual Installation (For Developers & Testing)

If you want to run the extension from source code:

For Google Chrome / Edge / Brave:

1. Download or clone this repository to your local machine.
2. Open your browser and go to chrome://extensions/.
3. Enable "Developer mode" (usually a toggle in the top right corner).
4. Click on "Load unpacked" and select the root folder of the repository (the one containing manifest.json).
5. The extension is now installed and ready to use!

For Mozilla Firefox:

1. Download or clone this repository.
2. Open Firefox and go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox.
3. Click on "Load Temporary Add-on..."
4. Navigate to the src folder and select the manifest.json file.
5. The extension will be loaded temporarily (it will be removed when you restart Firefox).

📚 Thesis Documentation

The full text of the bachelor thesis, written in Czech, including theoretical background, architecture design, and testing results, can be found here:

👉 Documentation/VoronkinT_InteaktivniNahledy_TH_2026.pdf

⚛️ LaTeX Live Preview

The LaTeX source files used to compile this document are located in the Documentation/LaTeX directory.

To automatically recompile the PDF on every file save and view it live in SumatraPDF:

cd Documentation/LaTeX
latexmk -pdf -pvc main.tex

-pvc (preview continuously) watches for file changes and recompiles automatically. SumatraPDF reloads the PDF in place without locking the file, making it ideal for this workflow. Requires a TeX distribution (TeX Live or MiKTeX).