151–160 of 180 posts
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I am pretty sure that there is a team of engineers whose job is to office obfuscate ads on Instagram and Facebook.
Surely these people can find something more beneficial to society to work on, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.
I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts I use bookmarklets all the time. I can't imagine living without them. For example, this is how I read HN: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1551483561621979136 The bookmarklet takes me to the latest HN post I have not seen. When I click it again, it takes me to the next I have not seen. As soon as I see a post I have seen before, I know I am up to date. I can't imagine readi…
It never occurred to me to try, but I think this is still possible even without the javascript: URI scheme, as there’d be nothing stopping you from putting an inline in an HTML page described by a data: URI, and bookmarking said data: URI.
Not sure what the browser would consider that data: page’s HTTP origin to be for cookie / CORS purposes, though.
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Would you mind giving me an example of something you've wanted to do that is really hard (or even nearly impossible) due to the these issues (so I have a standing concrete challenge case)?
Trying to block Google’s “people also search for” div (when you navigate back to the search results page) is not easy IIRC
I miss the "immediate web". Being able to work on simple things without feeling like they are useless, pointless or perceptibly outdated. Now it's install node, install git, install npm, install a gazillion packages, run localhost then hope everything works. Build command, clean command, eject commands, deploy command, pre processors, post processers, documentations full of so much jargon that i feel burnt out lookin…
It used to be you could open up your dev tools and figure out how things were made. And you could learn all sorts of things about architecture and style and techniques this way.
Now its all buried in build processes and obfuscation techniques, as if your button handler is a tightly kept secret that's somehow protected by scrambling your variable names.
Although the other day I came across a complex app that was built in modern vanilla JS with native ES6 imports alongside regular old CSS. It was a work of art.
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They aren’t dead but with more and more build systems that obfuscate everything in the page, including CSS classes and IDs, it’s sometimes hard to do something really useful.
Would you mind giving me an example of something you've wanted to do that is really hard (or even nearly impossible) due to the these issues (so I have a standing concrete challenge case)?
You'd probably think it'd be simple, right? This being the kind of thing that Cascading Style Sheets were designed to handle elegantly and gracefully?
https://maya.land/user-styles/youtube/
I always thought people on here were just cranks complaining about style bloat, because a lot of the "this could have been a text file" arguments were applied to things that were genuinely better with the presentation polish. But this? How can developer ergonomics be worth this?
Anyway, user styles and user scripts and bookmarklets are all great and I use them all the time. This level of Big Tech deformation of the basic web technologies makes them more annoying, but still not impossible.
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Why do browsers enforce CSP against bookmarklets and user scripts, though?
Bookmarklets & user scripts evaluate in the page's context. CSP literally says, only talks to these specific domains. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP#exampl... The browser doesnt block thr bookmarklet from running (iirc). But most bookmarklets immediately try to download & run some libraries to do their thing. Or they try to send data somewhere. And CSP is blocking those connections. Its hard fo…
Huh? Userscripts are dead according to author, but I apparently never got the notice because I have about a dozen of those things installed right now. Three of them are for YouTube because it's this much annoying as is.
Userscripts will run, but if they try to load any content from elsewhere, that breaks. So, for example, the Hypothes.is extension wont load. Affected sites keep growing. https://twitter.com turned on CSP many years ago.
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Would you mind giving me an example of something you've wanted to do that is really hard (or even nearly impossible) due to the these issues (so I have a standing concrete challenge case)?
ca. 2014 I was able to write a bookmarklet that scraped a twitter thread by accessing the DOM (even causing page navigation) and rendering it as a reply-tree. Two things make this vastly more difficult now: 1. Twitter uses obfuscated css classes that appear to change on every deploy, which makes scraping hard. 2. You used to be able to get around the limit on bookmarklet code size by adding a script tag to the page a…
I could see using a set of standard tweets you created to sort of benchmark the change.
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I use then to automate annoying workflows for FE development. Sometimes you need to click through a series of things to get the UI into the state you need. A bookmarklet is a perfect solution.
Check out Facebook’s Storybook if you haven’t already. It’s life changing when you don’t have to click through an app to get the state you need.