Chrome Extension Glossary
Plain-English definitions for social media, video, AI, browser extensions, and privacy terms you'll encounter in the wild.
Social Media
Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is a platform's mechanism for capping the number of actions — such as follows, unfollows, likes, or API requests — that a single account can perform within a given time window. It is used to prevent spam, bot abuse, and server overload.
Shadow Ban
A shadow ban (also called a ghost ban or stealth ban) is when a platform secretly limits the visibility of your account's content — such as hiding your posts from search results or other users' feeds — without notifying you that any restriction has been applied.
Follower Ratio
Follower ratio is the numerical relationship between the number of accounts following you and the number of accounts you follow. A ratio above 1.0 means you have more followers than you follow, which is generally seen as a signal of credibility and organic authority on social media.
Ghost Followers
Ghost followers are social media accounts that follow you but never interact with your content — no likes, comments, shares, or story views. They may be inactive accounts, abandoned profiles, or bots that were never genuine users.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a metric that measures the percentage of an audience that actively interacts with a piece of content — through likes, comments, shares, saves, or clicks — relative to the total number of followers or impressions. It is widely considered the most meaningful indicator of content quality and audience connection.
Algorithmic Feed
An algorithmic feed is a social media timeline that displays content ranked by a platform's machine learning model — based on predicted user interest, engagement probability, and relationship signals — rather than showing posts in reverse chronological order.
Social Listening
Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media platforms, forums, and online communities for mentions of specific keywords, brand names, competitor names, or topics — and then analyzing those conversations to inform business decisions, respond to opportunities, and identify trends before they go mainstream.
Non-Followers
Non-followers are social media accounts that you follow but that do not follow you back. They are a one-sided connection — you see their content in your feed, but they have chosen not to reciprocate.
Video & Streaming
HLS Streaming
HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is an adaptive bitrate streaming protocol developed by Apple that breaks video into small segments — typically 2–10 seconds each — and delivers them over standard HTTP. The player continuously selects the appropriate quality level based on available network bandwidth, ensuring smooth playback on any connection.
Video Bitrate
Video bitrate is the amount of data used to encode one second of video, measured in kilobits per second (kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps). Higher bitrate generally means better video quality and larger file size; lower bitrate means smaller files with potential quality degradation visible as compression artifacts.
Codec
A codec (short for coder-decoder) is a software algorithm that compresses video data for storage and transmission, and decompresses it for playback. Different codecs use different mathematical techniques to reduce file size while preserving visual quality, with newer codecs generally achieving better compression efficiency than older ones.
Container Format
A container format (also called a wrapper or mux format) is a file format that bundles one or more video streams, audio streams, subtitle tracks, and metadata into a single file. It defines the file structure and how the different streams are synchronized, but does not specify how those streams are compressed — that is the job of the codec.
DRM (Digital Rights Management)
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a set of technologies used by content owners and distributors to control how digital media — particularly video, audio, and ebooks — can be accessed, copied, and shared. DRM systems enforce licensing restrictions by encrypting content and only decrypting it within authorized, trusted playback environments.
AI & Machine Learning
LLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM (Large Language Model) is a type of artificial intelligence model trained on enormous amounts of text data — typically hundreds of billions of words — to predict and generate human-quality text. LLMs power chatbots, writing assistants, code generators, and summarization tools across virtually every domain.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing, structuring, and iterating on the inputs given to an AI language model in order to reliably elicit high-quality, accurate, and useful outputs. It involves understanding how models interpret instructions and using that knowledge to craft prompts that minimize ambiguity and guide the model toward the desired response.
Tokens
Tokens are the smallest units of text that AI language models process — roughly equivalent to four characters or three-quarters of a word in English. Every piece of text sent to or received from a model is broken into tokens, and usage is billed and limited by token count.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) is a model where users supply their own API credentials to a third-party tool or service, rather than relying on the provider's shared AI access. This gives users direct control over costs, model selection, and data handling.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI architecture that enhances a language model's responses by first retrieving relevant documents or data from an external knowledge base, then using that retrieved content as context for generating an answer. This allows AI to answer questions about recent events or private data it was never trained on.
Hallucination
AI hallucination is when a large language model generates text that is factually incorrect, fabricated, or internally inconsistent, yet presented with apparent confidence. The term borrows from psychology — the model 'perceives' and reports something that does not exist in reality.
Browser Extensions
Browser Extension
A browser extension is a small software program that installs into a web browser — such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari — to add new features, modify web pages, or automate tasks that the browser does not provide natively.
Manifest V3
Manifest V3 (MV3) is the third version of the Chrome extension platform specification, introduced by Google to improve security, privacy, and performance of browser extensions. It replaced Manifest V2 (MV2) starting in 2023 and requires all published Chrome extensions to adopt its new APIs and architectural constraints.
Content Script
A content script is a JavaScript (or CSS) file that a browser extension injects into web pages, running in the context of those pages. Content scripts can read and modify the page's DOM, react to user interactions, and communicate with the extension's background service worker — all without requiring any changes to the website itself.
Service Worker
In the context of Chrome extensions, a service worker is the extension's background script that handles events, manages state, and coordinates logic outside of any specific web page. Introduced as a mandatory replacement for persistent background pages in Manifest V3, extension service workers are event-driven and terminate when idle to preserve system resources.
Chrome Web Store
The Chrome Web Store (CWS) is Google's official distribution platform for Chrome browser extensions, themes, and apps. It serves as both a marketplace where users discover and install extensions and a regulated distribution channel where Google enforces security policies, privacy requirements, and quality standards.
Extension Permissions
Extension permissions are declarations in a Chrome extension's manifest that specify what browser capabilities and web resources the extension is allowed to access. Users see a summary of permissions during installation, and the permissions system is Chrome's primary mechanism for constraining what installed extensions can do.
Data Export
CSV Export
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) export is the process of saving structured data — such as a list of social media followers, contacts, or analytics results — into a plain-text file where each row represents one record and columns are separated by commas. CSV is the universal interchange format for tabular data, readable by spreadsheets, databases, and virtually every data tool.
IndexedDB
IndexedDB is a low-level browser API that provides a transactional, client-side database for storing large amounts of structured data — including files, blobs, and JavaScript objects — directly in the user's browser, without requiring a server. It is the primary storage mechanism for web apps and browser extensions that need to persist more data than localStorage allows.
Data Portability
Data portability is the right and ability of users to obtain their personal data from a platform in a structured, commonly-used, machine-readable format and to transfer it to another service. As both a legal right (under GDPR and similar laws) and a practical capability, data portability enables users to take their information with them when switching services or create backups of their digital presence.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting structured data from websites by programmatically reading the HTML content of web pages. It transforms unstructured web content — text, tables, links, images — into organized, machine-readable formats like CSV, JSON, or spreadsheets.
Web Scraping vs API
Web scraping extracts data from web pages by parsing HTML or reading the rendered DOM, while an API (Application Programming Interface) provides a structured, authorized endpoint for requesting data programmatically. The key distinction is authorization: APIs are sanctioned data channels provided by the platform, while scraping accesses the same information that is publicly visible to any user in a browser.
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a defined set of rules and protocols that allows one software application to request data or services from another. APIs are the universal language that lets different software systems talk to each other — from mobile apps fetching weather data to browser extensions sending prompts to AI models.
Privacy & Security
Data Residency
Data residency refers to the geographic location where data is physically stored and processed. It determines which country's laws govern that data, with significant implications for privacy rights, government access, regulatory compliance, and organizational liability. 'Data sovereignty' is a related term emphasizing that the laws of a nation apply to data within its borders.
Zero-Knowledge Architecture
Zero-knowledge architecture is a system design where the service provider has no ability to access, read, or decrypt user data — even if legally compelled, breached, or acting in bad faith. The user's data is encrypted client-side with keys that only the user controls, meaning the server stores only ciphertext that is meaningless without the user's key.
Put This Knowledge to Work
Now that you know the terms, try our Chrome extensions or explore related resources.