Whether you consider it a fun new feature or a shameless Snapchat rip-off (or quite possibly both), Instagram Stories looks set to stay.
Arriving on Instagram’s mobile app at the start of this month, Stories lets you create and share a collection of photos and videos showing “moments of your day.” And after 24 hours, the content disappears.
Now, if you’re the kind of person that likes to sometimes kick back and explore Instagram via your laptop or desktop, you’ll have noticed that the Stories feature doesn’t show up.
It’s not clear whether team Instagram has any plans to bring Stories to the web version of its service, though if it does, its track record when it comes to showing love to its web app suggests we could be in for a long wait.
But hold on, there’s some good news to report. Thanks to the excellent work of California-based Android software engineer Alex Garcia, you can now get Stories for web by downloading his recently created Chrome extension called, appropriately enough, “Chrome IG Story.”
Yes, you’ll have to install Google’s Chrome browser if you haven’t already done so, but the inconvenience (should you find such a step an inconvenience) is surely a small price to pay if you’ve been enjoying your friends’ Stories on the mobile app and desire the same experience for the bigger screen.
Once you have the extension up and running, you’ll see your friends’ available Stories located at the top of your feed on the Instagram website in the same way that the feature appears in the smartphone app. Then it’s simply a case of clicking the icon of the user whose Story you want to view.
The arrow keys let you jump back and forth, while the ‘esc’ key takes you out of the gallery altogether. Oh, and here’s another thing. A right click on the icon of any user posting a Story lets you download all of its content. “All the photos and videos on that user’s Story will be zipped up and the download will start,” Garcia says in a post. So any Instagrammers posting risqué stuff to Stories in the belief that it’s going to vanish the following day, take note. When it comes to the web, even vanishing content tends not to vanish.