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Maps Corrector

Two names, put back where they belong.

A Chrome extension that restores Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario on Google Maps — in the page text and on the map itself — with a red maple leaf on the label. Free, open source, and it touches nothing but Google Maps.

Gulf of AmericaGulf of Mexico Lake AmericaLake Ontario

In review at the Chrome Web Store

The one-click install button lands here the moment review clears. Until then it takes about thirty seconds by hand — and you get to read the source first.

Download the extension ↓

maps-corrector.zip · 38 KB · v1.0.0 · Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc

  1. Unzip maps-corrector.zip somewhere you'll keep it.
  2. Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode.
  3. Click Load unpacked and pick the maps-corrector folder.
  4. Open Google Maps.

// on the map

Google Maps with a dark label reading Gulf of Mexico and a red maple leaf over the Gulf
The Gulf, corrected
Google Maps at Lake Ontario with a dark label reading Lake Ontario and a red maple leaf
Lake Ontario, holding its name

How it works

Google Maps renders text two different ways, so the extension has to work two different ways.

Page text — search results, place titles, directions, the tab title — is real DOM text. A MutationObserver rewrites it as it appears. The dual-name forms collapse first, so you never end up with “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of Mexico)”, and matches are word-bounded, so Bank of America is left alone.

Labels drawn on the map are not text at all. They are pixels in a WebGL canvas — nothing in the page can read them, find them, or edit them. So each corrected name is pinned to the geographic centre of its feature and projected onto the canvas using the camera Google keeps in the URL. The label is drawn at that screen position.

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