We’ve been hard at work for the last few weeks and are happy to announce that our browser extensions are finally in public beta and available for download on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. We’ve been driven by the idea to help people unlock a brand new online revenue stream and now is your time to get behind a revolution and support your favourite content creators across the web.

Click to install on Chrome.

Click to install on Firefox.

We would like to thank our closed group beta testers for finding bugs that we fixed promptly and released some great new features that we’ll discuss further down bellow in this article.

What have you been up to?

First and foremost, let’s start with the basics and get to the more exciting features later.

We focused on fixing existing bugs and improving the performance of TipIOTA as a whole. We’ve implemented a tool that auto-promotes/re-attaches transactions. It cycles through all of them once every 5 minutes and automatically promotes/reattaches the ones that need a little extra care. The result? All transactions get confirmed. Some still take longer than others, but unfortunately, that’s out of our hands.

You can now see the transaction/tip status directly in the browser extension. Furthermore, you can click on the transaction status icon to get directed to a tangle explorer which will showcase all of the details related to that specific transaction. You have full oversight of how things are working.

In case your existing transaction is pending, TipIOTA won’t let you make any other tips. This feature is there to protect you, as a user, from double spending your funds. It’s a small feature, but it makes a big difference.

Besides our Chrome extension, we have released a Firefox extension as well. A lot of people asked for it, and we delivered. Our Firefox extension has the same functionality as our Chrome extension. No cutting corners.

What can I expect from your plugins?

Although things are usually working very smoothly, you have to keep in mind that despite the fact that we have fixed numerous bugs, there are still some more of them lurking in the dark. None of these will be detrimental, and we are more than happy to tackle any issues that you will ever encounter. To help you, we have set up a Trello board and stay active on Discord so help is never too far away. Be nice and understand that we only have two sets of hands. 😅

Any recommendations for a new user?

Yes, there are a few of them.

Disable plugins such as MinerBlock or uBlock while tipping someone, or your transactions will fail. They are blocking PoW (proof of work) that’s necessary to process a transaction. It only takes a few seconds to perform PoW and is nothing harmful. In fact, your official IOTA wallet has been doing it all along. You can re-enable these blocking plugins after your transaction is processed.

If you happen to be one of those power users and use TipIOTA on both, Firefox and Chrome browsers, make sure to use two different seeds. This measure is to avoid double spending your funds in case you tip people on both browsers at the same time. In future, this issue won’t exist since we will introduce user profiles and everything is going to be kept in sync.

In case your transaction is not getting confirmed for a long time, do not panic and jump ship. It’s tangle baby! 😎You can do a few things to help this situation yourself. Log into the official IOTA wallet app with the same seed you used to log into our plugin. Yes, you can log in both apps at the same time. It’s okay to do it and won’t break anything. Find your pending transaction and then try to reattach/promote it manually. It is usually sufficient but in case it’s not, you still have a few other options. IOTA Local PoW promoter sometimes works wonders and untangles the most tangled transactions. There is a Facebook group that’s full of users eager to give you a hand if you’re stuck. You can just share your address or transaction hash with them, and they will use this tool to get your transaction confirmed. It’s perfectly safe. Power in numbers.

We would also like to invite you to read our FAQs page. It will answer some of the most fundamental questions that range from “What is tangle” to “How to safely generate a new seed/wallet”. We are planning to use a more comprehensive support desk tool once we start to receive more questions.

Never create a seed/wallet online. You will, most definitely, lose all your funds. Follow the instructions on our FAQs page to learn how to do it safely.

Remember that we are in beta so things could still go wrong. Please do not use your primary seed with our plugins. Generate a new seed that you will use solely for tipping others. This practice is an excellent way to protect yourself anyway.

While we’re still on the topic of seeds, keep in mind that every time you generate a new address to receive your tips, you are making your seed/wallet slower. Anywhere above 20 addresses will make it painfully slow to log into and also to refresh your balance. Unfortunately, this problem is related to tangle, and we cannot do a whole lot about it. On the flip side, if things are getting a little slow, you can always make a new seed and transfer your balance there. It’s a clean start. While testing, we had to do it multiple times so you will not be alone. Although there are apps such as KeePass, they are tedious to use. Using command line is also something foreign to most of the users, and therefore we’ve designed a simple TipIOTA Seed Vault app. The idea behind this app is to allow users to quickly generate new seeds and also to store their existing seeds. Everything would be encrypted and locked out from connecting to the internet. For those in doubt, this app is going to be open sourced. While not a perfect solution, a handful of seeds with small balances don’t deserve anything more than that. We are looking for developers who could contribute in their spare time. If you would like to help, drop us a line on Discord.

Design of the TipIOTA Seed Vault

How do I actually tip someone with your extensions?

We’ve put together a few gifs illustrating the entire process.

Create a new seed/wallet by following our guide in order to do it safely.

Sign into TipIOTA. Remember, you can only tip someone if you actually have some funds in your seed. Don’t have any IOTA tokens yet? Read our guide to buying and exchanges.

Look out for “Tip IOTA” badges on Reddit and go wild — tip people!

Where can I download your browser extensions?

The Google Chrome extension is available on the official Chrome Web Store. The Mozilla Firefox extension is available on the official Firefox Add-ons website. Both extensions have been verified and approved.

Click to install on Chrome.