The thing I like most is that I can leave an MR tab in the background and the tab title flips to a check mark or a cross when the pipeline finishes. I never have to go back and hit refresh to find out. LabHub is a Chrome extension for gitlab(.)com and self-hosted GitLab. It does two jobs. It reskins GitLab with GitHub's colors and layout: green buttons, state pills, a bordered MR list, GitHub diff colors, a repo header with Code, Issues, Merge requests and Pipelines tabs, and the left sidebar hidden behind a menu button. It also keeps pages fresh. Freshness turned out to be the harder part. GitLab renders most of a page once, so a tab you come back to can show old approvals or an old pipeline. LabHub gets around that by taking a cheap API fingerprint of what the page shows and re-checking it every minute in the background, or every 30 seconds while you're on the tab. If anything changed, it reloads. The tricky bit was making sure a reload never costs you anything. It won't reload while there's typed text in a comment box, a focused input, an open dialog or a text selection. In those cases it shows a small "This page has updates" bar and waits until it's safe. The extension only sends read-only GET requests to the API, using your existing session cookie. It needs no tokens, has no server and collects no analytics. I built all of it, including the tests and CI, in a single Claude Code session. Code: https://github.com/myselfshravan/LabHub   submitted by   /u/shravanrevanna [link]   [comments]