AI Assistant Sidebar: Switch Between Major AIs to Supercharge Your Browsing

Summary

The "AI Assistant Sidebar" is a revolutionary Chrome extension that transforms your browsing experience. Without ever leaving your current tab, you can instantly access and switch between major AI services like Vertex AI (Gemini), OpenAI (ChatGPT), and AWS Bedrock, all from a convenient sidebar. Dramatically improve your efficiency in research, writing, translation, coding, and more.

Key Features

• Multi-AI Platform Support: A single, polished interface supports a wide range of AI services. Effortlessly switch to the best AI for your task.

  • Vertex AI: Leverage Google's powerful Gemini models.
  • OpenAI-Compatible API: Supports over 7 providers, including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Groq, DeepSeek, and Ollama.
  • ChatGPT: Directly integrates with the official ChatGPT API.
  • AWS Bedrock: Access a diverse set of foundation models from AWS, including Claude, Titan, and Llama.

• Seamless Web Page Integration:

  • Automatically extracts the title and main content of the page you're viewing to use as context for the AI.
  • Include any highlighted text from the page in your AI prompts with a single click.

• Sophisticated Chat UI:

  • Full Markdown rendering for beautifully formatted code blocks, lists, and headings.
  • Each AI response is clearly marked with the provider's icon, so you always know which AI you're talking to.
  • Full support for both English and Japanese, automatically switching based on your browser's language settings.

• Flexible Customization:

  • Configure detailed settings for each AI service, including models and API keys.
  • Set global custom instructions that apply to all AI providers for a consistent response style.

How to Use

1. Add the extension to Chrome.
2. Click the extension icon in your browser's toolbar to open the side panel.
3. On first use, open the Settings tab (gear icon) in the side panel to configure the AI services you want to use (e.g., by entering API keys).
4. Return to the Chat tab (speech bubble icon), select an AI, and start your conversation.
5. To use information from the current page, ensure the "Include page content" checkbox is enabled.

Privacy, Security, and Transparency

We prioritize your privacy and data security above all else.

• Local Data Storage: Your API keys and authentication credentials are saved securely in your computer's local Chrome storage. They are never transmitted to any external servers, including our own.
• Direct AI Communication: Your interactions with the AI are sent directly from your browser to the official API endpoints of each AI service. No third-party servers are involved.
• Minimal Permissions: This extension requests only the minimum permissions necessary to function.
  • sidePanel: Required to display the sidebar UI.
  • storage: Required to save your settings in the browser.
  • activeTab, scripting: Required to access page content when you grant permission.
  • Host Permissions (e.g., https://.googleapis.com/): Required to communicate directly with the AI services.
• Open Source: This extension is open-source software (OSS). The complete source code is available on GitHub, allowing anyone to verify its functionality and transparency.
  • GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mostlyfine/ai-assistant-sidebar (https://github.com/mostlyfine/ai-assistant-sidebar)

Elevate your browsing and AI-powered workflows to the next level with this extension.

Changelog

[1.0.4] - 2025-08-17

🔒 Security

• Enhanced security management with comprehensive test coverage
• Added proactive permission checking for page content integration

🧪 Testing

• Expanded test suite with improved source code validation
• Added comprehensive security testing for API credentials
• Enhanced integration testing for all AI providers
• Improved test file organization and cleanup

📚 Documentation

• Updated file structure documentation to reflect current codebase
• Enhanced test documentation with detailed coverage information
• Improved development command documentation

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed test file list accuracy after codebase cleanup
• Improved ping message handling in content script

[1.0.3] - 2025-08-04

✨ Features

• Improved permission error handling to display user-friendly messages (b319c0c).

🔒 Security

• Updated form-data to fix a critical vulnerability (a543f03).
• Removed all_sites permission to minimize security risks (9136f99).

[1.0.2] - 2025-07-20

Added

• Conversation history persistence functionality
• Improved UI components and user experience
• Enhanced chat interface with better user interaction

Fixed

• Fixed typo in .gitignore file
• Resolved various configuration issues

Improved

• UI/UX improvements for better user experience
• Code cleanup and optimization

[1.0.1] - 2025-07-19

Added

• Enhanced HTML structure improvements
• Expanded AWS Bedrock model selection support
• Better model compatibility across different providers

Fixed

• Removed unnecessary console logs for cleaner code
• Improved debugging and development experience

Security

• Enhanced AWS Bedrock API authentication system
• Improved security validation and error handling
• Strengthened API authentication mechanisms

Changed

• Updated .gitignore configurations
• Cleaned up Claude configuration files
• Optimized GitHub Actions workflows
• Improved security checks to focus on actual values only
• Enhanced configuration validation features

[1.0.0] - 2025-07-18

• New Release