Hi Dustin, we started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! ️
HN is remarkably fickle; a browser extension is a perfectly reasonable user-friendly mechanism for the service given the choices out there. There are privacy concerns given the coarse level of granularity that Chrome provides, but until Google changes that ("Read and change all data on websites you visit" shouldn't be the same thing as "give the current URL to the browser extension when I click its button"), that's just what we're stuck with for user friendliness.
