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For your next side project, make a browser extension

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#151

Post by mfrisbie »

toastal wrote: post #145
mfrisbie wrote: post #99

I was enthusiastic enough about extensions that I decided to publish a book about building them: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ Browser extensions are severely underrated as a platform because they aren't sexy. For all that mobile devices have given us, so much of our work continues to be done using a desktop browser. Enhancements such as augmenting websites with widgets, supplying contextual information,…

Fx on Android allow add-ons. I've used them for years.

I'm a faithful Firefox Mobile user myself, it's the easiest way to use an adblocker on a mobile device. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that extensions are a desktop-first platform: things like popups, omnibox API, contextmenu API, or customizing developer tools either aren't applicable in a mobile format or don't translate very well.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#152

Post by karmelapple »

mfrisbie wrote: post #99

I was enthusiastic enough about extensions that I decided to publish a book about building them: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ Browser extensions are severely underrated as a platform because they aren't sexy. For all that mobile devices have given us, so much of our work continues to be done using a desktop browser. Enhancements such as augmenting websites with widgets, supplying contextual information,…

Mobile devices support extensions to some degree now, too! iOS Safari fully supports them, so that’s millions upon millions of potential users.

Unfortunately, the UI for initiating them isn’t quite as nice as the desktop, which is a big reason why we haven’t implemented our extension for iOS yet. Once Apple figures out a better install and activation workflow, then we’ll probably do it.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#153

Post by daveed »

derefr wrote: post #110
daveed wrote: post #104

I spent some time some productivity extensions, for gmail replies[0] and quick notetaking[1]. It was a lot of fun, but like other people have mentioned, porting to and working with manifest v3 is not as nice. I've noticed also that the way Google asks for permissions from the user is done in human-understandable, but worst-case language. For example, I think there was something where I wanted access to the current ta…

They're describing the worst-case thing someone could do with the privilege being granted, because they have no way of saying what the developer will do with the privilege. The way to make the prompt sound less scary, is to use finer-grained permissions where the worst-case thing someone could do is less scary. (Or, if there aren't any fine-grained permissions suited to doing your task — then propose some! The browse…

> They're describing the worst-case thing someone could do with the privilege

I understand that - I wrote just that in my comment above. But it's a lot scarier to see a pop-up saying "This extension in the worst case does this", versus the worst-case scenario and a longer explanation. I see from your profile that you're at a web3 analytics company. I'll just say that I think metamask would be a lot less popular if at install-time, the chrome store alerted that it can "make you lose all your crypto savings". Yes this is possible, but there's more to the situation than just a few words, and you can't express that all in an alert() window.

> if there aren't any fine-grained permissions suited to doing your task — then propose some I think that is easy to say, but being subscribed to and reading updates to the extension feedback threads that I've been on for the last few years, I'm not super confident in Google acting on community feedback.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#154

Post by alanbernstein »

lvass wrote: post #135
Animats wrote: post #28

No, don't. They're not that hard to code, but both Google and Mozilla keep making changes and then bitching at you through their app stores to change your thing. I recently dropped Chrome support on an add-on because 90% of the users were on Firefox. Since it blocked some ads, I figured Google would continue to whine, and it wasn't worth the hassle.

Use tampermonkey if possible. Or better yet, extend software that doesn't break, like Emacs.

Heh, I agree with this viewpoint, but "software that doesn't break, like Emacs" sounds extremely generous to me.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#155

Post by mfrisbie »

karmelapple wrote: post #152
mfrisbie wrote: post #99

I was enthusiastic enough about extensions that I decided to publish a book about building them: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ Browser extensions are severely underrated as a platform because they aren't sexy. For all that mobile devices have given us, so much of our work continues to be done using a desktop browser. Enhancements such as augmenting websites with widgets, supplying contextual information,…

Mobile devices support extensions to some degree now, too! iOS Safari fully supports them, so that’s millions upon millions of potential users. Unfortunately, the UI for initiating them isn’t quite as nice as the desktop, which is a big reason why we haven’t implemented our extension for iOS yet. Once Apple figures out a better install and activation workflow, then we’ll probably do it.

Safari's extension support is great, I was keen to include that in the book. Having to develop extensions inside XCode and deploy them in the Apple App store felt a bit odd, but it's really interesting how the extension has a dedicated "app" on the phone, which allows for some interesting possibilities.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#157

Post by techdragon »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #150
techdragon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the gap is a mile wide. If you can see the current page url, you can see the next page URL and thus one page at a time you have the users browsing “history” from the moment they installed the extension, if you can run arbitrary JavaScript then you can check the back URL, you could potentially add some scope related restrictions to what injected JavaScript can do based on the permissions of the injectin…

The only actual solution to this problem is some kind of human review. I wouldn't be against an "App Store" model provided users could go around it if they chose. I think Mozilla does something like this with certain "featured" extensions?

You would need to have code review on every update and to ensure that no code downloads anything it evaluates, and potentially even check for interactions with other plugins which could be compromised to provide eval mechanisms in an effort to “wash hands” of any malicious changes in later updates. (Since the long tail of updates seems to be one of the significant risk factors with less scrupulous actors trying to buy popular extensions for things like ad revenues before later dumping them to people who use them for malware or lousy eventually turning to malware themselves.

A review process can help but sadly it’s got a lot of work to do if it want to actually “solve” the problems here.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#158

Post by karmelapple »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #125

Would recommend waiting a few weeks for Firefox to ship Manifest V3 because Chrome store isn't accepting new V2 extensions and Mozilla isn't yet accepting V3. 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.

The deprecation timelines have been postponed [1] [2]. You can still submit v2… but it’s probably best to build for v3 now.

1. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/more-mv2-transition/ 2. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio...

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#159

Post by karmelapple »

btown wrote: post #133
weaksauce wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

side loaded extensions are not persisted every restart of the browser.

Wait, “load unpacked” doesn’t persist anymore?

It persists for me as recently as three weeks ago. I think it still works fine.

Re: For your next side project, make a browser extension

#160

Post by oefrha »

AlbertCory wrote: post #22
cldellow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Legalities of this? They seem to be getting away with it. The US government runs PACER itself, they don't contract it to a profit-motivated third-party. [1] As a result, they're pretty lenient. At one point, their website said: "The information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission". So it's totally legal. The RECAP people also make it _really_ easy to…

Thanks, didn't know all that. I put in the "legalities" part mainly because I was thinking of a similar extension to defeat Elsevier & other vultures of scientific publication. Those people might be more litigious.

> defeat Elsevier & other vultures of scientific publication

That’s a great way to have your life savings drained, or worse. Don’t do it if you live anywhere where you can be nabbed by Uncle Sam. See Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan.

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