Chrome, Edge, and Opera. It’s a Manifest V3 extension built on Chrome’s native side panel, so the panel is a real browser surface: it docks beside the page instead of floating over it, and it never shifts or covers what you’re reading.
Install
- Chrome
- Edge
- Opera
1
Add the extension
Open the Chrome Web Store listing and select Add to Chrome, then Add extension.
2
Pin it
Click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar and press the pin next to BeforeQuery. The panel opens from that button.
3
Sign in
Open app.beforequery.com and sign in as normal. The dashboard hands the session to the extension automatically — open the panel and you’re in.
Open the panel
Rebind it at
chrome://extensions/shortcuts if it clashes with something.
What it does
Ask, with citations
Type a question in the panel. Answers stream in with numbered citations that link straight to the source document — the same retrieval pipeline and the same grounding rules as everywhere else in BeforeQuery, so it declines rather than guesses when your content doesn’t cover the question. The panel searches every knowledge base you’re allowed to chat in, across every workspace you belong to. Narrow it with the scope bar at the top: pick knowledge bases, source groups, or individual sources. Filters are remembered per machine, since which subset you want usually depends on what you’re doing on that computer. Restricted documents are included — you’re a signed-in workspace member, so you see what you’d see in the dashboard.Pick up an earlier conversation
The history button in the panel header lists your recent conversations — today and yesterday by name, then by date. Open one and it loads back into the panel with its full transcript, so a question you asked on Monday is still there to follow up on. It is the same conversation store as the dashboard’s Ask section, filtered to you: a thread you started in the browser panel is waiting in the dashboard, and the other way round.Related documents for the page you’re on
Turn on Page suggestions and the panel quietly surfaces documents related to whatever page is in view — a support ticket, a spec, a competitor’s changelog — with no question asked. It’s off by default, on purpose: it needs permission to read the pages you visit, and we won’t ask for that at install time for a feature you haven’t turned on. Flip it on in the panel’s settings and Chrome asks then, at the moment the permission is actually for.Suggestions retrieve and stop — no answer is generated, no conversation is saved, nothing is persisted. The query is capped and debounced so browsing doesn’t hammer the API.
Save pages and passages
The clipper puts a page, or just the part you highlighted, into a knowledge base — useful for the answer you found in someone’s forum thread, a vendor’s PDF, or an internal wiki the crawler can’t reach.- Save a selection — highlight text, right-click, Save selection to BeforeQuery. Needs no page access at all: the selection travels with the click.
- Save a page — right-click anywhere and choose Save this page to BeforeQuery, or use the clip button in the panel. This one reads the page, so it needs the optional permission.
files source named Web clips, created the first time you use it. Pick a different knowledge base or source in the clip dialog; the choice is remembered.
Two passages from the same page stay two documents, and re-saving one updates it in place rather than duplicating it. A clip of a page your crawler already indexed won’t collide with the crawled version either — the clip keeps the page’s URL so its citation stays clickable, with a fragment appended to keep the two apart.
Right-click anywhere
Preferences
Open the panel and click the settings icon.
Preferences sync with your Chrome profile, so a second machine gets them without setup. Scope filters stay local to each machine.
Permissions
The extension asks for as little as possible, as late as possible. At install it requests only the side panel, its own storage, context menus, and scripting — no access to any website. Chrome’s install prompt reflects that. At runtime, and only if you turn on page suggestions or save a whole page, it asks for permission to read pages. Chrome shows its own “read your data on all sites” prompt at that moment — the honest place for it, since you’ve just asked for the feature that needs it. Turn the feature off and you can revoke the permission. Page content is read to find related documents or to build a clip you asked for. Nothing is stored from pages you merely visit. Sign-in works by hand-off: the dashboard passes your session to the extension, and only the dashboard origin can — it’s pinned in the extension’s manifest at build time and checked again on every message. Signing out of the dashboard clears the extension too.FAQ
- Do I need an admin to install it? No. It installs like any other extension and uses your own account’s permissions.
- Which knowledge bases can I search? Every one you have chat permission for, across every workspace you belong to. Owners and admins get all of their workspace’s; members and users get the ones explicitly shared with them.
- Why can’t I clip? Clipping needs
edit_sources. Ask a workspace owner or admin to grant it. - Does it read every page I visit? Not unless you turn on page suggestions. Without that permission it can still answer questions and save highlighted passages.
- Can I move the panel to the other side? That’s Chrome’s to decide — it owns side-panel placement and offers extensions no way to move it. Drag the edge to resize; Chrome remembers.
- Does it work offline or on internal sites? The panel needs to reach your BeforeQuery API, but the page you’re on doesn’t have to be public — clipping an internal wiki page is one of the better reasons to use it.