Get Up-to-Date Monero Pricing Info With These Chrome and Firefox Add-ons
You do not need a tab open on Poloniex all day. A handful of small browser add-ons will put the current XMR price in your toolbar and leave you alone otherwise.
Why bother
Monero's price has been anything but boring this year, and most of the "check the price" habit is just reflexively reloading an exchange page. A ticker in the browser bar scratches the itch without the tab, and, more usefully, several of these add-ons let you set a quiet alert for a threshold instead of watching the chart.
Chrome
- Monero Price Ticker — the simplest of the bunch. Shows XMR/USD or XMR/BTC as badge text on the toolbar icon, pulling from Poloniex by default with Bitfinex and Kraken as options. Refresh interval is configurable from 30 seconds to 10 minutes; the default is 60 seconds, which is plenty.
- Crypto Ticker — a multi-coin ticker where Monero is one of about a dozen supported assets. Worth it if you also hold BTC or ETH and want everything in one popup; overkill if you only care about XMR.
- Monero Balance Watcher — not a price tool exactly, but pairs well: give it a view key and it shows your balance next to the price. Treat this with the caution any view-key tool deserves and don't paste keys into extensions you haven't read the source of.
Firefox
- XMR Ticker — near-identical in spirit to the Chrome ticker: badge text, choice of exchange and fiat pair, optional desktop notification when the price crosses a value you set.
- Cryptocurrency Price Alert — general purpose alerting add-on with Monero support. Its strength is the alert rules (percent change over an hour, crossing a price, and so on) rather than the ticker itself.
Things to check before installing anything
- Permissions. A price ticker needs to talk to one or two exchange APIs and nothing else. If an add-on asks to read and change data on all websites, close the tab.
- Source availability. The good ones link to a GitHub repository. The tickers above all do; read the fetch code, it is usually under a hundred lines.
- Where the number comes from. Most tickers quote a single exchange. Poloniex has the deepest XMR market at the moment, so it is the sane default, but the difference between venues can be a few percent on a volatile day.
If you would rather not run any of this, the community-maintained price pages on r/Monero and the various block explorers all show a current quote in the header and will not ask for any permissions at all.
This page is a reconstruction. The original Hello Monero article for this slug did not survive; the text above is a period-appropriate stand-in written for this archive. Add-on names are illustrative of what circulated in 2016 rather than a verified list.