[gmurphy]

I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being addons. Many of us owed our careers to the path that view source opened, and we wanted to pay it forward.

I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.

[DonHopkins]

A brilliant idea that would never make it through the legal department.

Somebody I worked with at TomTom had the brilliant idea of gamifying the driving experience with internet connected TomTom PNDs, by publishing a real-time Leaderboard on every single road on the map, so you could see the top ten speeds, and compete with other drivers for the high score! No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!

My TomTomagotchi idea didn't go over well with TomTom legal either: they didn't want their PNDs getting depressed and dying if you didn't give them food, attention, and drive them around everywhere they wanted. But I was sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.