Button Stealer: A Browser Extension That Hoards a Button From Every Site You Visit

Anatoly Zenkov’s “Stolen Buttons” is a novelty browser extension art project that grabs a copy of a button from every website the user visits and files it away in a personal collection. The result is a sprawling, decontextualized gallery of interface elements — “Log In,” “Accept,” “Reject All,” “In den Warenkorb,” “Continue with Facebook,” “Start free trial,” cookie-consent prompts, and countless calls to action scraped from the everyday web.

Stripped of their original pages, the buttons read as an accidental portrait of how the modern web actually behaves: relentless prompts to register, subscribe, accept tracking, upgrade to premium, and hand over an email. The multilingual jumble (English, German, Swedish, Chinese) underscores how uniform these dark-pattern-adjacent conventions have become across sites and regions.

There’s no security payload or exploit here — it’s a piece of tech culture commentary rather than a tool. Its value is in making the ambient, easily-ignored UI of consent banners, upsells, and engagement nags suddenly visible as a single overwhelming pile.