DE · EN

Download the extension

For Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers. Free, open source, no account.

bahntastic for ChromeVersion 0.9.0

Then the three steps below — two minutes. The built-in update notice tells you when a new build is out.

Installation

Step 1

Unpack it

Download the ZIP and unpack it into a folder that can stay where it is — Chrome reads the extension from there on every start. So don't leave it in a downloads folder you clear out regularly.

Step 2

Turn on developer mode

Open chrome://extensions and switch on “Developer mode” in the top right corner.

Step 3

Load the folder

Click “Load unpacked” and pick the folder you unpacked. Done — the bahntastic icon appears in your toolbar.

Why no one-click installer? For security reasons Chrome does not install extensions from outside the Web Store with a click on a website. That restriction makes sense and we don't work around it. A Web Store release is in preparation; until then the steps above are the official route.

Rather skip installing? The browsing service on the front page strips pages down without any extension — just type an address.

What you get

Level 1

Data saving

Large images load on click only, ad and tracking networks are blocked, known sites switch to their light versions automatically (Reddit, DuckDuckGo, NPR). Optional coarse-pixel previews instead of blank placeholders.

Level 2

Emergency mode

Pages arrive as a text version served by bahntastic.de — kilobytes instead of megabytes. If a page stalls for too long, the extension offers to switch by itself.

Extra

Gmail diet

On mail.google.com: external images in mails load on click only, Chat/Meet payload and telemetry are blocked. The mail core stays untouched.

The extension collects no usage data; everything it learns about the pages you visit stays in your browser. Details in the privacy policy.