Help & FAQ

As you browse, Brief notes which tab is focused and for how long, keeping those intervals in local storage on your device. Once a day — at your local day boundary — it sends that day's intervals to the Brief backend, where a language model turns them into a short, readable report. The next time you open your browser, yesterday's brief opens in a new tab.

The first time you open Chrome on a new day, Brief opens the previous day's report in a fresh tab. There's nothing to schedule or click — if you didn't browse the day before, there's simply no brief to show.

That's expected. Brief reports on yesterday, so it needs a full day of activity before it has anything to write. Install it today, browse normally, and your first brief shows up tomorrow morning.

No. Brief records the URL and title of the focused tab and how long it held focus — that's it. It has no content scripts and never reads or stores the body of a page. See the Privacy Policy for the full list of what's collected and where it goes.

Brief creates an anonymous account automatically on first use, so it works out of the box. Signing in with Google is optional — it attaches an email to that account so your history survives a reinstall or move to another machine. Brief is free either way.

To stop tracking, disable or uninstall the extension from chrome://extensions; no further activity is recorded. Uninstalling also clears Brief's local storage. To delete the intervals and briefs held under your account on the backend, email support@productivities.fyi from your account email and we'll remove them.

Yes — the extension is MIT-licensed and published at github.com/zachzwy/brief. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome there.