Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

flightpenguin.com

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#21

Firefox add-on please

A big part of why we're crowdfunding is to be able to grow the team and support more platforms (e.g. Desktop Firefox & Safari, mobile devices)

Does the extension use any Chrome specific WebExtension API? Otherwise it might be fairly trivial.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#22
I greatly miss Hipmunk, and would really like a successor. But I'm confused as to why this needs to be a browser extension instead of just a website. Even if you provide extra features as an extension, show comparisons if I'm flight sites, etc, I'd still like to just have a website I can go to to search flights, not requiring a browser extension to use.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#23

Looks like something I'd definitely use. But first, how do I ensure that my personal, browsing, and financial data is not shared with third parties and not collected for anything other than core functionality? Also, what is the purpose of the subscription? edit for typo

There shouldn't be any reference to a subscription. Can you let me know where you saw one? We used to have this setup as a paid extension, but pivoted away as that business model didn't work as well as we'd have liked. Re: privacy and data. You can certainly review the settings we request and our terms of service - we ask to run the extension on a number of travel sites we interact with. We only collect your search i…

Thanks. I saw it on the subdomain and page header bar on the privacy policy page.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#24
post #22

I greatly miss Hipmunk, and would really like a successor. But I'm confused as to why this needs to be a browser extension instead of just a website. Even if you provide extra features as an extension, show comparisons if I'm flight sites, etc, I'd still like to just have a website I can go to to search flights, not requiring a browser extension to use.

The short answer is because certain airlines behave in ways I can best describe as 'scummy'. Some airlines are now demanding anti-consumer provisions when they do deals with travel sites, such as insisting that sites hide cheaper flights, hide multi-airline itineraries, and hide certain booking options. We think this compromises the user experience heavily and erodes trust - you don't know if you're getting the best possible flight. Being a browser extension gives us the ability to show the lowest fares without going through airline servers or airline contracts, since we can search and compile all the data from your browser.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#25
post #22

I greatly miss Hipmunk, and would really like a successor. But I'm confused as to why this needs to be a browser extension instead of just a website. Even if you provide extra features as an extension, show comparisons if I'm flight sites, etc, I'd still like to just have a website I can go to to search flights, not requiring a browser extension to use.

From the description "Being a browser extension gives us the ability to show the lowest fares without going through airline servers or airline contracts, since we can search and compile all the data from your browser."

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of why we're crowdfunding is to be able to grow the team and support more platforms (e.g. Desktop Firefox & Safari, mobile devices)

Does the extension use any Chrome specific WebExtension API? Otherwise it might be fairly trivial. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Candidly, the Firefox extension framework is significantly nicer. Blam'ing chrome.runtime.lastError.

There's a lot of small amounts of work to get everything working right using the webext module. We're slowly chipping away, we've eliminated all our dependencies on chrome specific modules in the last month while working on other functionality, but we're a really small team right now with competing priorities, so this will get more priority as we get more people on the team.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#27

Looks like something I'd definitely use. But first, how do I ensure that my personal, browsing, and financial data is not shared with third parties and not collected for anything other than core functionality? Also, what is the purpose of the subscription? edit for typo

There shouldn't be any reference to a subscription. Can you let me know where you saw one? We used to have this setup as a paid extension, but pivoted away as that business model didn't work as well as we'd have liked. Re: privacy and data. You can certainly review the settings we request and our terms of service - we ask to run the extension on a number of travel sites we interact with. We only collect your search i…

From https://subscribe.flightpenguin.com/privacy

>Signing up and Purchasing a Subscription. When you purchase a subscription to our Services, your credit card information, billing information, and any other financial information necessary to complete your purchase (“Payment Information”) is processed by our third-party payment processor, and we do not collect, store, or process your Payment Information. After you purchase a subscription to our Services, we will receive your email address from Stripe as confirmation of your subscription purchase. For more information, please see the “Payment Processing” section below.

>we automatically receive information about your interactions with them, such as the contents of your searches, the length of time you spend on a page, objects such as hyperlinks you click on, the airlines you prefer, and the dates and times of your visits.

>We and our third-party partners may collect information using cookies, pixel tags, or similar technologies. Our third-party partners, such as analytics and advertising partners, may use these technologies to collect information about your online activities over time and across different services.

>We may receive personal information about you from third parties such as the websites we send you to book your travel and combine it with other personal information we have about you.

>Vendors and Service Providers. We may share any personal information we receive with vendors and service providers retained in connection with the provision of our Services.

>We do not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with nonaffiliated companies for their direct marketing purposes unless we have your permission. *emphasis mine

>We may use analytics services such as Google Analytics and Sentry to collect and process certain analytics data. These services may also collect information about your use of other websites, apps, and online resources.

>We may transfer your personal information to service providers, advisors, potential transactional partners, or other third parties in connection with the consideration, negotiation, or completion of a corporate transaction in which we are acquired by or merged with another company or we sell, liquidate, or transfer all or a portion of our assets.

>We may also disclose your personal information with your permission.

>There is no accepted standard on how to respond to Do Not Track signals, and we do not respond to such signals.

While I recognize that most of this is standard practice among the data thieves, I thought it pertinent to call out your simplistic glossing over of your data thieving intent.

Hipmonk was a valuable service and one that I'd gladly pay for, but my data is worth way more than that.

BTW - You and I both know that if I specify "Do Not Track" then I don't want you to track anything about me.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#28
Neat! Way back in the day (circa 1998!) we (ITA) released a Java applet that offered Gantt chart -- we called it "colored bars" -- airfare search. This applet downloaded a compact representation (graph) of all the possible solutions into its working memory and applied all the sorting and filtering client-side in real time. So it was really fast and powerful.

Of course, Java applets as an ecosystem died so we ended up with the server-side matrix design. It's nice to see the same (client-side) concept resurrected again 20+ years later.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#29

Why does the extension need a Google login? I deleted the login div from the HTML, and the extension works fine without the login.

Yes please remove that. If you are not selling PII, as you said you were not, then you don't need a login.
Post reply on HN