Ghostchars for Chrome is live in the Chrome Web Store

The Ghostchars browser extension is in the Chrome Web Store. It was published on 2026-08-26 as version 1.0.0, and it installs from its own page on this site, which carries the button only while the listing is actually there.

It is the engine behind the cleaner on this website, moved to where your text already is. It runs in Chrome 116 and later, and in the Chrome-family browsers built on the same code: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera. One listing installs in all of them. The popup and the right-click menu are free and unlimited, on every site, and nothing you clean leaves your browser.

The three ways to use it are listed here the way the settings page lists them: by how much access each one needs. The first needs none at all.

• The popup. Paste text, press Clean, and the cleaned version comes back on your clipboard, with the same three counts this site shows: removed, kept because it was load-bearing, found but not targeted. It cannot see the page behind it, it needs no permission at all, and it is unlimited.
• Right-click, Clean selection with Ghostchars. The item appears only when text is selected. The selection is replaced in place when the field is editable and copied to your clipboard when it is not. Your click is the permission, it covers that one tab, and it expires with the tab.
• Clean as you paste. Off everywhere until you turn it on, one site at a time from the settings page, or for all https sites in a single prompt if you prefer. Cleaned text then lands instead of what you copied, with a small note saying what was removed. Turning a site off hands the permission straight back to the browser.

The third one is the only metered part, because it is the one that works while you are not looking: 20 cleans a week, free, and $24 once lifts that in the extension and the Mac app alike, on up to 3 of your own devices. The count is on your own machine, the settings page always shows it and the day it resets, and a paste with nothing to clean in it is not counted. When a week runs out nothing is taken away: the paste goes in exactly as the browser would have pasted it, and the popup and the right-click menu keep working.

Five permissions, which is the complete list in the manifest: activeTab, contextMenus, scripting, storage and clipboardWrite. No site access is requested at install. The host permission that clean-as-you-paste needs is optional, https only, asked for when you switch a site on and handed back when you switch it off. The table on the extension page is the same text the review form was given, one row per permission.

That is checkable rather than promised. The package bans fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, EventSource and sendBeacon in its own lint configuration, with one override scoped to the single file that makes the activation request, and a test re-runs that search on every build. The full disclosure names the file and prints the command.

Clean-as-you-paste does not work inside Google Docs, and not for want of trying: Docs draws its editor on a canvas and never fires a paste event an extension can see. The popup and the right-click menu both work there.

It does not detect, score or estimate whether text was written by an AI, and it makes no claim about what any detector will say afterwards. It does not read your pages, your history or your clipboard in the background; nothing runs on a site you have not switched on. A paste that carries a file, a screenshot or an attachment, is left entirely to the browser, so nothing you pasted goes missing. And its own interface is English for now, which is why the menu item quoted above is in English; the engine treats every language identically.

Install it, and read every permission first · What it sends, in full · Clean something here instead