September in sports is just getting going. The pennant races are still very much being chased, college football played its first Saturday of the year today, and NFL kickoff is exactly one week out from turning every other browser tab into background noise. We spent the summer getting ready for exactly this — new ground broken on the game screen, in Settings, and on the field itself.
Here’s the scouting report.
The football card finally speaks football
Open a live football game and there’s a real field under the score now: mown grass, yard lines, hash marks, painted numbers, both end zones in their real team colors, and the home crest sitting right on the 50. On top of it, the line of scrimmage in blue and the line to gain in yellow — the same two colors broadcasts have used since 1998, so you already know how to read it without being told — plus the yardage this drive has actually covered, and the ball itself, right where the last play left it.
- The NFL and college football hash marks sit in genuinely different spots on the field, and yes, we drew both correctly
- The ball holds its position through timeouts and after a score instead of snapping to whatever bogus yard line our sources radio in mid-play
- It’s a detail-screen-only feature. A card just tells you whether to switch; where the ball is sitting is what you want once you’ve already opened the game
The pre-game screen finally has something to say
A game that hasn’t started used to give you two crests, “vs.,” and a kickoff time. Riveting. Now it also tells you who’s probably pitching (record and ERA included), which goalie is expected to start and whether it’s confirmed, each team’s overall record, and the stat leaders on both sides — headshots included, or a colored initials disc on the rare game our sources forgot to snap a photo.
ArenaSwap reads your open tabs now
New tabs that look like they might be showing a game turn up in a review sheet, matched to what we think they are.
- Open a tab with a game on it
- Check the suggestions banner in the popup
- Confirm the ones that look right, ignore the ones that don’t
Nothing gets assigned until you tap it. And no, we’re not showing you a confidence score — a match is either good enough to suggest or it isn’t.
Favorite teams don’t require reinstalling the extension anymore
Picking favorites used to be an onboarding-only decision. Start following a new team in October and your only move was starting over from scratch. There’s a Favorite Teams page in Settings now:
- Open Settings
- Tap Favorite Teams
- Search or scroll, tap the star
Your favorites stay pinned at the top of the list even after you’ve switched their league off — a favorite is a fact about you, not about which leagues you happen to be tracking this week.
Holiday decorations (we know, we know)
It’s September. We built them anyway, because making you wait until December to find out felt cruel. Snow now falls on any game our sources report snow at, leaves fall on football during Thanksgiving week, and string lights hang off the scorebug the whole month of December — with the pile on the floor of the popup getting deeper as each period goes on and resetting flat at every break. Score while the lights are up and they’ll flash your favorite team’s colors for five seconds.
Turn any of it (or all of it) off under Settings > Display.
The site speaks twelve languages now
The extension has for a while. The website selling it hadn’t, which meant clicking a translated store listing dropped you straight into English copy. Not anymore — the whole site matches now, minus the docs and these release notes, which say so plainly at the top of the page rather than pretending otherwise.
No huddle — the rest of it:
- Up Next pages by day instead of cutting a busy slate off after ten games, sometimes mid-afternoon
- Coming back from a game keeps your spot in the list — and which day you’d paged forward to, if you had
- Series trackers are back for the regular season, not just the postseason — baseball’s “leads series 2-1” was quietly missing for most of the year
- Venue names the city now, not just the (recently renamed, deeply confusing) building
- Fixed a timezone bug that could make games near the front of your Upcoming window vanish if you weren’t on Eastern time
- Switch cooldown can go all the way down to Off now, joining switch delay down there
- A shared city no longer gets counted as evidence for two different teams — a Dodgers game won’t get suggested as the Rams just because Los Angeles shows up twice
- That “no games” message stopped auditioning all seven jokes on every refresh before landing on one
We also tucked a couple of things into Settings for anyone with a very itchy trigger finger. We’re not telling you where. Good luck.
Rate us five stars if an 0-12 MAC team just beat a BIG 10 team in their very first game 🏈