The spiritual successor to Mozilla Lightbeam
Lightbeam (2013–2019) showed Firefox users their third-party graph. It was discontinued, the niche went unfilled, and the modern web only got noisier. NetGlobe picks the thread back up — with a live world map, real categories, and Manifest V3.
What you see
A side-panel that updates as you browse. No interrupting overlays, no popups in the page itself.
Live world map
Animated arcs from your location to every server your browser hits, plus a permanent dot for each destination city. Pan, zoom, click a city to filter.
15 categories
Ad-tech, identity sync, analytics, content recommendations, ad-verification, social pixels, AI providers, ByteDance, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, CDN, other — each colour-coded.
Four scopes
Current page, entire tab, this window, or all windows — every visualization (map, log, header counters, country heatmap) follows the chosen scope live.
Tracker shield
One click mutes the six ad-tech subcategories at once; the badge counts what's hidden so you keep a sense of scale.
Lifetime heatmap
Opt-in country choropleth that survives browser restarts, kept in chrome.storage.local as alpha-2 → count. Off by default. Pro
Hub descriptions
Click a destination dot in Mountain View, Ashburn, Frankfurt or one of ~15 hubs and you get a short "what runs here" line — not just a city name.
In motion
A typical news article load — about 200 requests, ten countries, six advertising-sub-category buckets.
The privacy promise
NetGlobe is a privacy tool, so the same standard applies to itself.
- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting. The extension never phones home.
- The only outbound calls are the geolocation lookup (server IP only — never URLs or page content) and, if you activate Pro, a weekly license re-validation against Lemonsqueezy.
- No persistence beyond the browser session for request data — the per-tab buffer lives in
chrome.storage.sessionand disappears when you close Chrome. - Two opt-in exceptions to
chrome.storage.local: the Lifetime-heatmap counter (country → count map) and your Pro license key (if you activated). Nothing else persists across browser restarts. - Open source, MV3, no remote scripts.
FAQ
What exactly is NetGlobe?
A Chrome extension that listens to chrome.webRequest events on every tab, geolocates the destination IP, and draws a live arc from your location to that server in a side-panel world map. It also keeps a categorized log of every request, with country, city, latency, and size.
Does it collect any of my data?
No. The only outbound call NetGlobe itself makes is the geo lookup through the Cloudflare Worker proxy. It sends only the destination server's IP address, never the URL, never any cookies, never the page content.
There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, and no account. Full details in the privacy statement.
Why does it need <all_urls> permission?
Because trackers live on every domain. A whitelist would defeat the point — you would specifically not see the unexpected third parties that NetGlobe is built to surface. The extension only reads request metadata (URL, IP, status, content-length); it does not block, modify, or read response bodies.
What about HTTP/3 (QUIC) traffic?
chrome.webRequest partially obscures QUIC streams — most notably YouTube video data. Search requests, thumbnails, API calls, and everything else in the same session remain visible. This is a Chromium platform limitation, not a NetGlobe choice.
Does it work in Firefox?
Not yet. A Firefox port is on the roadmap but blocked on Manifest-V3 parity. Edge works automatically through the Chrome Web Store distribution.
Is it free?
Yes — the core feature set (world map, request log, 15 categories, scopes, tracker shield, hub descriptions) is free and stays free. There's a Pro tier (€19 lifetime or €3 / month) that unlocks: the lifetime heatmap (persistent country fill across browser restarts), the data watchlist (alert when your email or phone is sent to a third party), and the tracker translator (plain-language explanation of every tracker query parameter).
Core privacy features will stay free — there's no paywall around being able to see what your browser is doing.
How can I help?
Bug reports, category-rule additions, and translation contributions are all welcome via GitHub Issues. The extension already ships with English and German locales; adding another locale is a one-file PR under _locales/.