Building Margin: A Privacy-First News Reader Inside Chrome's Side Panel (opens in new tab)

I built a Chrome extension called Margin — a news reader that lives in the browser's side panel and shows one bite-sized story at a time, instead of an infinite-scroll feed. This is a build log: the decisions, the constraints that pushed back, and a couple of things I had to solve in slightly unusual ways. Why the side panel Chrome shipped chrome.sidePanel in MV3 a while back and most uses I saw were utility tools — note-taking, translation helpers. Nobody was using it for content consumption...