121–130 of 286 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your intentions are to only use the extension for yourself, why not just side load it?
side loaded extensions are not persisted every restart of the browser.
Browser extensions are useful. I've made some simple ones and published a few: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/14310707/ But it's also worth considering where the browser gives priority. For example, while browser extensions can add custom keyboard shortcuts, they can't override the keybindings a website uses. Want to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-1 for a browser extension while a Google Docs pag…
I try to stay away from browser extensions as much as I can, it will only bloat my browser even further. Firefox + Tampermonkey should be enough in my case. Is there anything a browser extension can do that Tampermonkey cannot?
It's true that many extensions could "just be" Tampermonkey scripts. I'd guess they ship as standalone extensions due to a combination of: less friction to install, more discoverable, can extend with fancier features later on, and probably just inertia/ignorance from developers unaware of Tampermonkey.
I have a personal browser extension that I use as a grab bag of assorted tools and fixes for sites that annoy me. It's half way between a userscript, a bookmarklet directory, and a UNIX shell, with little commands that run automatically on certain sites or operate on the DOM, and can pipe output to other commands. Here's a very old video of it in action: https://vimeo.com/118090094 (It's no longer open source because…
Firefox MV3 is also a bit different, requiring some swapping / toggling that wasn't needed for MV2.
Worth the pain though as extensions are like magic fairy dust for websites you otherwise cannot control.
Someone I interviewed once did something like this and we couldn't think of a reason not to hire them because they effectively showed us they were capable of understanding and modifying our existing code which was basically what we wanted in a candidate.
PSA: If you're making a browser extension, please support Firefox as well, not just Chrome. Firefox makes it easy since they support the `chrome` namespace for functions [0]. You can also use React/Next.js or another frontend library too if you prefer. I had created an extension a while ago out of pure HTML, CSS, and TypeScript but I found that was quite annoying to add more complex features with lots of state. I swi…
The library is tiny, under 5 kb.
peterhil/spellbook: Spellbook is a bookmark extension for Chrome and Firefox https://github.com/peterhil/spellbook
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your intentions are to only use the extension for yourself, why not just side load it?
side loaded extensions are not persisted every restart of the browser.
That was around 5-7 years ago and I haven't checked if there was a new alternative, easier way to do it nowadays. I'm still using my extensions but have no need to modify them. Let's see what Manifest v3 has to tell me about this. I'll probably drop Chrome then.