Why Cat Mode is like this

What was broken

There is a whole genre of video made for cats: birds pecking at seed, a mouse crossing the frame. Cats love it. Cats do not watch it politely. They pounce, paws land on the keyboard, and the video pauses, skips, mutes, or a new tab opens over the top of it.

So you spend the session leaning over the animal to undo whatever just happened. The same thing happens with a toddler on your lap, or any screen left playing where something can touch it. The failure is always identical: input the human did not intend, reaching a page that obeys it perfectly.

The obvious fix is unavailable. Switching off the keyboard lives at the operating-system level, outside what a browser extension is allowed to touch, which is presumably why nobody had built the simple version of this.

Who it’s for

• Anyone whose pet walks across the keyboard while a video plays
• Parents holding a small child in front of a screen
• Anyone leaving a page playing where it can be touched

Who it isn’t for

• People needing input blocked across the whole machine rather than in one page
• Browsers other than Chrome
• Anyone expecting it to stop a cat sitting on the volume keys. macOS owns those, not the page

Rules we don’t break

Decided once, so they never have to be argued about again.

• Intercept, do not disable. A player cannot pause on a spacebar it never received. A paw cannot click skip if the click never reaches the page. That one idea is the entire product.
• The video must keep playing. Lock the input, never the content. Anything that stops playback has failed the only test that matters.
• A human can always get back in. A deliberate chord unlocks it, and an auto-disable timer means nobody can be locked out for long.
• Be honest about the boundary. It works in the page, because that is where an extension is allowed to work. The limits are stated up front rather than discovered with a cat standing on your laptop.

What it actually does

• One-click input lock. Blocks keyboard and trackpad input on the current page.
• Panic unlock. Ctrl+Shift+K works even while everything else is blocked.
• Auto-disable timer. The safety net that makes the lock comfortable to use.
• The Paw Report. A tally of everything the cat tried to type. It is a joke, and it is also proof the lock worked.
• Settings that follow you. Preferences sync through your Chrome account to every machine.

What it refuses to do

The most useful part of any note like this. Every line has a reason attached.

• System-wide input blocking. That needs a native app and accessibility permissions: a much bigger trust cost for a problem that lasts twenty minutes.
• Accounts or telemetry. A free extension with one switch has no business knowing who you are.
• Cross-browser support. The interception idea ports fine. The effort does not pay for itself yet.

How we’ll know it worked

• A cat video session ends without the human touching the laptop once.
• Nobody gets stuck locked out. The timer and the chord exist to guarantee it.
• The Paw Report gets screenshotted, which is how a free, silly, useful extension travels.
• An uninstall after one session would mean the lock broke playback, which is the one unacceptable failure.

Where it could go wrong

• Page-level only, by design. Hardware keys the system owns still work. A paw on the volume row is outside what any extension can catch, and pretending otherwise would be the real bug.
• Sites that fight for input. Players and single-page apps bind events in their own ways, so interception has to survive pages that re-bind aggressively.
• Extension platform churn. Chrome's manifest and permission rules move, and a blocked update means a broken extension for everybody at once.

What’s next

• Keep it small. The product is one switch and it is finished. The work is staying compatible with Chrome, and with players that fight back.