How I Built a Chrome Extension to Improve Reading on Medium

I read a lot of articles on Medium. Mostly technical stuff, product stories, startup ideas, and random things I find while browsing. But there were a few things about the experience that kept annoying me. One was finding an article I actually wanted to read, opening it, and then realizing it was behind a member-only restriction. If I wanted to see whether there was another publicly available version, it usually meant manually searching for it. Another thing was Dark Mode. I genuinely don't understand why Medium still doesn't have a proper native Dark Mode for reading. Maybe I'm missing something, but in 2026, opening a long article at night and getting hit with a completely white screen still feels strange. And then there was saving articles. Sometimes I find something useful and want to keep it for later, but that becomes another separate process. None of these problems are huge on their own. But when you keep running into them, they become annoying. So I started thinking about building something around that. The problem wasn't really finding another tool There are already websites and extensions trying to solve some of these problems. But a lot of them change your whole flow. You find an article on Medium, then you're redirected somewhere else. Or you need to copy the URL, open another website, paste it there, and wait for another version of the page. Some tools use proxies or their own servers in the middle. Again, nothing is necessarily wrong with that. But it never felt natural to me. I'm already on Medium. I already found the article there. Why should I need to leave the page and start another process? I wanted something that felt more integrated with the normal browsing experience. I wanted to keep the original experience That became the main idea behind the extension. Instead of making users go to another website or manually copy URLs around, I wanted the extension to work in the background while they were already browsing Medium. The goal was simple: open an article normally and let the extension handle the repetitive parts where possible. I didn't want it to feel like you're using a separate service. I wanted it to feel closer to something that belongs in the browser. That was probably the biggest design decision behind the project. Then I thought about Dark Mode This was a very personal frustration. I read a lot at night, and I like Dark Mode pretty much everywhere. My editor has it. My browser has it. Most apps have it. Then I go to Medium and open a long article. Bright white page. I kept wondering why there still wasn't a proper native option for this. So I added Dark Mode to the extension. Nothing revolutionary. I just wanted the option to exist. And honestly, this is one of those cases where building a small feature for yourself is sometimes enough reason to build it. Saving articles was another thing Sometimes I find an article that I know I'll probably need later. Maybe it's a technical explanation. Maybe it's a tutorial. Maybe it's something I want to read properly when I'm offline. Usually, that means another tool or another process. So I also added PDF export. The thinking was basically the same as before: if I'm already reading something useful, why should saving it require going somewhere else? It's not a complicated feature, but it removes another small annoyance. A bunch of small frustrations can become a product I think that's probably what I learned most from building this. The project didn't start with some massive idea. It started with small things that kept happening: Manually checking whether another version of an article was available Having to switch between different tools Wanting Dark Mode and not having it Wanting to save something for later without another workflow Individually, these are all minor problems. Together, they started to feel like a broken experience. So instead of trying to solve each one with a separate tool, I tried putting them into one browser extension. Keeping it simple was important I didn't want to turn this into one of those extensions with twenty buttons and a huge settings page. The whole reason I started building it was to remove friction. So I tried to keep that idea throughout the project. Let the repetitive stuff happen automatically where possible. Keep the optional features simple. Don't make people learn another complicated workflow just to read an article. That was pretty much the approach. Still figuring it out The extension is still something I'm experimenting with and improving. Most of the initial ideas came from my own frustrations, which also means there are probably things I'm missing. Other people might use Medium completely differently from me. Maybe the biggest annoyance for someone else isn't article access or Dark Mode. Maybe it's organizing saved articles, typography, distraction-free reading, or something else entirely. That's why I'm interested in hearing what other people find frustrating about the reading experience. Sometimes the best product ideas are just things you've become so used to being annoyed by that you stop noticing them. The project Anyway, this is what I ended up building: Medium Paywall Remover. Despite the name, the bigger idea behind it became improving the overall Medium reading experience rather than just solving one problem. If you're curious about the project, you can check it out here: Details at our Site Try Out From Store But more than anything, I'd like to know: what is the one thing that annoys you most when reading on Medium?