On August 13, 2026, WordPress released an official browser extension for Google Chrome and Safari. It is free, open source, and solves a problem that has annoyed developers and site owners for over a decade: the admin bar.

If you have ever toggled off the admin bar in your profile settings only to lose all the shortcuts that came with it, you already know the tradeoff. The extension eliminates it. You hide the bar on the sites you choose, and the shortcuts move to the browser toolbar instead.

What It Actually Does

The core feature is straightforward. Open the extension menu, toggle the admin bar off for a site — or globally — and it disappears from the page. The viewport is now the real viewport. No more debugging sticky headers that break because of an extra 32-pixel bar at the top that visitors never see.

The shortcuts do not disappear with the bar. The extension surfaces the same links you would find in the admin bar: dashboard, editor for the current post or page, profile settings, and anything plugins added to the bar. They live in the extension popup now, one click away. Bringing the full admin bar back takes two clicks and no trip to the settings screen.

Beyond the admin bar fix, the extension acts as a lightweight WordPress detector. Browse any site and the toolbar icon tells you whether it runs WordPress and whether you are signed in. On sites you manage, the popup gives you direct links to the dashboard, the block editor for the current page, and the Site Editor for block themes. A local launcher remembers sites you have signed into, so they stay accessible even when you are somewhere else.

The Developer Tools Nobody Expected

The extension ships with a handful of tools that are surprisingly useful for something that started as an admin bar workaround.

Block outlines draw boundaries around every block on the rendered page. If you have ever tried to figure out which <div> corresponds to which block in the editor, this eliminates the guesswork. It renders the block structure directly over the live page.

A phone-sized preview window opens a narrow viewport for checking responsive layouts. There is a cache-busting reload that appends a query string to force fresh assets, and a cookie and local storage clearer scoped to the current site. None of this requires a plugin or any server-side software. It works on every WordPress site you visit, including ones where you do not have admin access.

Privacy by Design

All processing happens locally in the browser. The extension reads the page in front of it to determine what it is looking at. When it needs more information, it queries the site directly through the REST API. Your preferences, site list, and login state stay in the browser. There is no tracking, no analytics, and no data leaves your machine.

This is a notable departure from the third-party WordPress extensions that have filled this space for years, many of which phone home with browsing data or inject their own analytics.

How We Got Here

The extension started as an independent project by Jake Goldman. It became an official WordPress project with backing from Matt Mullenweg. Fabian Kägy, a core contributor at Fueled (formerly 10up), helped shape the early design and architecture. Khokan Sardar contributed multiple patches, and several other Fueled colleagues provided testing and feedback.

It is open source on GitHub at WordPress/browser-extension, where bug reports and pull requests are welcome.

Who Should Install This

If you maintain even one WordPress site, this is worth installing. The admin bar fix alone justifies it — you get a clean viewport without losing quick access to the dashboard. The WordPress detection and dev tools are bonuses that make it genuinely useful for anyone who works with WordPress professionally.

The extension is available now in the Chrome Web Store and the Mac App Store for Safari. Firefox support is not available yet, but the open source repository suggests it is on the roadmap.

For an extension that began as a fix for one annoying tradeoff, it has grown into something that fills a gap WordPress did not know it had. The admin bar was always a compromise between convenience and accuracy. This extension lets you have both.