Browser pets: what happened to the little animal on your screen

In 1989 a program called Neko put a cat on your screen. It chased the cursor, caught it, and fell asleep on it. Written for the NEC PC-9801 and ported since to the Mac, X11, Windows and most things with a screen — usually by people nobody asked.

The desktop pet era

Neko was followed by a long tail of the same idea: a small animal that lives on top of your work, reacts to what you do, and has no function. Shimeji mascots climbing your window edges. Office assistants nobody wanted. All of them decoration, and all of them harmless.

Then, at the end of the nineties, the idea took its worst turn. BonziBuddy and its relatives were desktop pets in the front and adware in the back, and they taught a generation that the cute purple thing on the screen was reading your email. That association is the reason a decorative extension now has to open by explaining its permission list.

What the browser changes

A desktop pet has a whole screen to wander and no idea what you are doing. A browser pet has a much smaller stage and far better information: it knows what you are reading, how fast, and the moment you stopped.

That turns the pet from a decoration into an instrument. scrolldog's position along the window edge is how far down the page you are. Its gait is your scroll speed. It sits when the page goes quiet and curls up to sleep after two minutes — a real signal about the tab, not an animation on a timer.

The rules a browser pet has to follow

It renders on top of pages it did not write, which sets the terms: never touch the page's layout, never make a network request from the page you are reading, and offer one switch that removes it from every open tab at once. Neko could crash your machine and it stayed a curiosity. An extension that makes every site stutter is uninstalled by lunchtime.

It is a cat, sometimes. One of them is a duck, one is a horse with a problem, and one is a cockroach. Mostly it is a dog.