Map Distance

Map Distance — Map tools where the question comes up Geographic questions rarely arrive while you have a map open. They arrive on a rental listing, in a spreadsheet column, halfway down an email, in the middle of a forum post. Answering one means copying the text, opening a new tab, finding the right tool, pasting, and losing your place. Most of the time it is not worth it, so the question simply goes unanswered. Map Distance removes that trip. Highlight an address or a coordinate anywhere in your browser, right-click, and get the answer next to the page you were already reading. WHAT IT DOES Select any text and the extension works out what it is. Coordinates are recognised in almost every notation people actually use: decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, degrees and decimal minutes, UTM, MGRS, Plus Codes, geohashes, geo: URIs, and links copied straight from Google Maps or OpenStreetMap. Anything that looks like a street address or a place name is handled too. Then pick an action: • Show on map — pin the place in a side panel that stays with the tab. • What's here? — the full address, plus city, county, state, ZIP, country and elevation. • Convert coordinates — every supported format at once, each with a copy button. • Measure distance from… — set a starting point, then highlight a second address on any other page to complete the measurement. • Elevation here — height above sea level in feet or metres. KEY FEATURES • Straight-line and driving distance together — see the crow-flies figure, the real driving distance and time, and the detour percentage between them. The listing that claims "five miles from downtown" rarely means five miles of road. • Pins that accumulate across tabs — collect four listings from four tabs and compare them on one map, side by side, without losing any of them. • Radius tool — a true geodesic circle from 1 to 500 miles or kilometres, with area and perimeter, and a centre you can drag. • Drive-time areas — see everywhere reachable in 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes by car, bike or on foot. Answer "can I actually commute from here?" before you book a viewing. • Area measurement — click around a shape to get the enclosed area and perimeter. • County, state and FIPS codes — the identifiers that tax lookups, insurance quotes, jury forms and public datasets keep asking for, ready to copy. • Place search with autocomplete, and a "Where am I?" card that reports the accuracy your browser actually claims instead of pretending to be GPS. • Hand-off links to Google Maps, Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap when you want the full experience. • Miles or kilometres, switchable anywhere in one click, remembered across your browsers. • Dark mode that follows your browser, and full keyboard navigation. WORKS WITHOUT THE NETWORK County, state and FIPS lookups run entirely on your own device, against US Census boundary data bundled inside the extension. There is no request to send and nothing to wait for — the answer appears immediately, and it still appears when you are offline. PRIVACY, PLAINLY There is no Map Distance server. No account, no sign-in, no API key, no analytics, and no data collected about you by anyone who makes this. Text you highlight is examined on your own device. It leaves your computer only when you choose an action that genuinely needs an outside answer — a geocode, a route, an elevation — and then only the coordinate or the search text itself is sent, to open public services: OpenStreetMap Nominatim, Photon, FOSSGIS Valhalla, Open-Meteo and OpenFreeMap. Requests carry no cookies and no identifier. Your browsing history, the pages you visit and their contents are never read or collected. The extension does not ask for access to the websites you visit. The right-click actions work because your browser hands over the text you selected, and nothing else. One optional feature — a small badge that appears beside a highlighted address — does need broader access, so it is switched off until you turn it on, it asks permission at that moment, it gives the permission back when you switch it off, and it never appears on banking or webmail sites. FORTY-THREE LANGUAGES The whole interface is translated into every language the Chrome Web Store supports, following your browser automatically — including proper right-to-left layout for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, and compass points and units written the way each language actually writes them. GOOD TO KNOW Requires Chrome 114 or later; Microsoft Edge works too. Routing and drive-time areas come from a free, best-effort public server, so if it is briefly unavailable the exact straight-line distance is still shown with a note. This is a quick-answer companion, not a replacement for a full mapping site: there is no turn-by-turn navigation and no live traffic. Install it, highlight an address, and right-click.