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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ultra Zoom Launches Privacy-First Hover-to-Zoom Extension With On-Device AI Upscaling

Independent studio releases a Chrome and Firefox add-on that restores hover-to-zoom on image-heavy websites — with a Real-ESRGAN model bundled inside the extension so AI enhancement happens locally and no image data ever leaves the browser.

May 5, 2026 — Lost Rabbit Digital LLC today announced the public launch of Ultra Zoom, a free hover-to-zoom browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The tool enlarges any image on a webpage the moment a cursor passes over it, replacing a workflow that has long required users to open photos in separate tabs — and pairs that core capability with on-device AI upscaling that reconstructs detail in low-resolution images without sending them to a remote server.

Hover-to-zoom is a long-standing browser feature category, but the most widely installed extensions in the space have a troubled history. The original Hover Zoom extension, once installed by millions of users, was caught logging the URLs of every page its users visited and selling the data. Successor extensions have stopped working on the highest-traffic image sites, including major image search engines, social networks, and marketplace platforms.

Ultra Zoom is engineered to make that scenario structurally impossible, the company said. The extension contains no analytics endpoints, no remote-code loaders, and no server-side component that processes browsing activity. All image handling happens in the browser. The codebase is built on Manifest V3, the current Chrome extension security standard, which restricts the dynamic code patterns that enabled past privacy abuses.

AI upscaling that runs entirely on the user’s device

Ultra Zoom ships with Real-ESRGAN (general x4v3), a neural upscaling model that reconstructs detail in low-resolution photos at hover time. Unlike the cloud-based AI features that have become common in browser extensions, the model weights are bundled inside the extension package itself. There is no remote inference endpoint, no cloud GPU dependency, and no opt-in for cross-network image transmission — because no image data is ever sent off the machine. When the model can’t initialize on a particular device, Ultra Zoom falls back to high-quality Lanczos resampling automatically.

The feature is targeted at workflows where users routinely encounter aggressively compressed images they need to inspect: MLS listing photos, e-commerce product thumbnails, archival scans, and auction-catalog imagery. Users can toggle AI upscaling on a per-domain basis from the extension popup.

“People shouldn’t have to choose between a tool that works and a tool that respects them. Ultra Zoom does the boring thing: it zooms images, and that’s it. There is no telemetry pipeline because we never built one. There is no opt-out for data collection because there is no data collection — and that includes the AI feature. The model runs on your device, and the image you’re hovering over never leaves the browser.” — David McHale, founder, Lost Rabbit Digital

Listing-aware overlays for real-estate workflows

Ultra Zoom’s plugins for Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Crexi extract structured listing data alongside the photo. The hover overlay surfaces the listing’s status (NEW, OPEN, SOLD), price, full address, and the beds / baths / square-footage line as a caption, so a buyer’s agent screening a search-results page can review listings without opening every detail tab. A Shift+L shortcut opens the underlying listing page; A copies the address to the clipboard. On Redfin, gallery enumeration resolves every photo in a listing rather than only the thumbnails rendered in the page DOM, so arrow-key navigation walks a 40-photo listing in a single pass.

Coverage and pricing

The extension supports more than sixty popular destinations out of the box, including Google Images, Bing Images, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Unsplash, Pexels, Wikimedia Commons, Getty, AP News, and Bilibili. A generic engine handles hover-zoom on the long tail of websites that do not have a dedicated plugin, and a community-maintained URL rules pack lets users add new sites between releases.

The free tier covers theater mode, reverse-image-search shortcuts for Google, TinEye, Yandex and other engines, gallery navigation with arrow keys, a 50-image local hover history, region copy, batch download (up to five images per session, with an Ultra Zoom attribution watermark), an EXIF viewer, and a color-palette tool. Ultra Zoom Pro removes the watermark and image cap, adds on-device AI upscaling, video playback controls, an expanded one-thousand-entry hover history with full-text search, custom URL rules, and JSON / CSS / GPX exports for the EXIF and palette panels. Pro is priced at $3.99 per month, $29.99 per year, or $59.99 for a lifetime license, with a seven-day free trial.

Ultra Zoom is available immediately from the Chrome Web Store and the Firefox Add-ons gallery. Install links, documentation, and the full list of supported sites are published at https://ultrazoom.app.