Extension or SDK? The extension is for people you employ — it needs a BugCatch account and works everywhere. The SDK is for your customers — it needs no account and works only inside your product. Most teams run both.
1. Install it
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Add it from the Chrome Web Store
Open the listing and press Add to Chrome. It works in any Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc.
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Pin it
Click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar and pin BugCatch. Unpinned, it is two clicks away at the moment you most need one — and Rewind is only useful if capturing is faster than the bug disappearing.
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Approve the permissions
Chrome will say the extension can read and change data on all sites. It has to: a bug report tool that only worked on a list of sites you enumerated in advance would not work on the site where the bug is. What it does with that access is below.
What each permission is for
| Permission | Used for |
|---|---|
<all_urls>, activeTab | Capturing the tab you are on, whichever site that is. |
scripting | Reading console output, network activity and page environment from the page itself. |
tabCapture, offscreen | Screen recording and Rewind. The recorder runs in a hidden document because a service worker cannot hold one. |
storage | Your API base, project and session token. Nothing else is kept. |
notifications, alarms | Telling you when a bug you are watching changes. |
2. Sign in
Open the extension and fill in four fields. It signs in as you, a member of the workspace — not with an API key.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| API base | https://api.bugcatch.sphoro.com — already the placeholder. Change it only when working against a local API. |
| Project ID | From Project Settings → General in the dashboard. Decides where your captures land. |
| Your dashboard account. | |
| Password | The same one. |
Then the authenticator code. Two-factor is mandatory on every account, so the password alone gets you a challenge and nothing else — this is the same six digits your app shows for the dashboard.
To switch projects, sign out and back in with a different project id. One installation points at one project at a time, deliberately: a dropdown of every project you can see is a way to file a production bug into a staging queue at the one moment you are not reading carefully.
3. The three ways to capture
Screenshot
Captures the visible tab and opens it in the annotator. Four tools: arrow, rectangle, freehand and blur. Fill in a title and a description, press Submit.
Use blur before you submit, not after. It rasterises into the image, so what reaches the dashboard genuinely does not contain what you covered — unlike a black box drawn over a layer.
Record screen
A deliberate recording you start and stop. Chrome shows its own picker so you choose the tab, window or screen to share; the popup collapses to a live timer while it runs, and Stop & review opens the video in the same form as a screenshot.
Rewind — the last two minutes, after the fact
The one people install it for. Press Start Rewind, pick a surface to share, and then forget about it: it buffers roughly the last two minutes of screen activity and throws away everything older. When something breaks, reopen the extension and press Capture the last 2 min — you get a video of what just happened, without having been recording on purpose.
- Nothing is uploaded until you press capture. The buffer lives in memory in a hidden document on your own machine. If you never press it, nothing ever leaves.
- Memory is bounded. Chunks are dropped as new ones arrive, so leaving Rewind on all afternoon costs the same as leaving it on for two minutes.
- Restart it after each capture. The recorder is torn down to free memory once you have your video.
Rewind is recording your screen. It is off until you start it and it shows in the popup while it runs, but it is worth saying out loud to a team before you roll it out — particularly to anyone who shares a screen with customer data on it.
4. What is attached, without you doing anything
All three capture modes carry the same context, collected from the page itself rather than from the browser's own internals:
- Console — log lines, uncaught errors and unhandled promise rejections, from
document_startonward. - Network —
fetchand XHR traffic the page made: URL, method, status, duration. - Environment — URL, viewport, screen, platform, browser, language, timezone.
Because it reads what the page does rather than proxying the browser, it sees your application's own requests — not every asset Chrome fetched. That is the useful half.
Credential scrubbing applies here exactly as it does in the SDK: secrets are stripped out of URLs before the entry is buffered. See keeping secrets out of reports.
5. Where it will not work
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
chrome:// pages, the Web Store |
Capture is blocked by Chrome itself, by design. No extension can read them. |
| PDF viewer, some app-store pages | Same restriction. |
| Firefox, Safari | Not supported today. Use the SDK, which is plain web and runs everywhere. |
| A page that loaded before the extension was installed | Reload it. Console capture starts at document_start, so it cannot see what a page did before it was there. |
localhost and staging behind a login both work. The extension runs in your own signed-in browser, so anything you can see, it can capture — which is exactly what the SDK cannot do before you have shipped a build.
6. Rolling it out to a team
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Invite everyone who will file bugs
Workspace Settings → Members. Each person needs their own account — the extension signs in as a member, so a shared login means every report is attributed to the same person. Remember the plan caps members: two on Free, twenty on Team.
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Send them the project id with the install link
It is the one value they cannot guess, and the sign-in form asks for it before it will do anything.
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Agree on what Rewind is for
The teams that get value out of it leave it running during test sessions and support calls. The ones that do not, forget it exists until the bug has already gone.
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Connect the tracker before, not after
Otherwise the first week's reports sit in a second tool nobody has the habit of opening. Integrations →
Still stuck?
Every answer here describes what the product actually does today. If something behaves differently, that is worth telling us about — it means the page is wrong.
- Support
- support@sphoro.com
- Security
- info@sphoro.com
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