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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

#171

Post by koolba »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #168

I built 3 chrome extensions for fun: Notion Boost - 50k+ users , made 3000$ so far https://github.com/GorvGoyl/Notion-Boost-browser-extension/ ChatGPT Writer - 20k+ users within 3 weeks of launch https://chatgptwriter.ai : Gimme Summary AI - just launched https://gimmesummary.ai

> ChatGPT Writer - 20k+ users within 3 weeks of launch

So this plugin sends the contents of the user’s email to ChatGPT?

I understand that it’s clearly opt-in as the user is installing the plugin, but what the heck?

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

#172

Post by paulryanrogers »

Zuiii wrote: post #169

Unless I can write and distribute extensions without signing a legal agreement or having to involve a thirdparty gatekeeper, I'd rather not.

Chrome allows permanent side loading for users in dev mode. Firefox requires at least uploading to Mozilla for signing and some sanity checks, then you can side load or self host them.

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

#173

Post by derefr »

Folcon wrote: post #131
derefr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (Or, if there aren't any fine-grained permissions suited to doing your task — then propose some! The browser vendors would love to get real feedback on the kinds of fine-grained hypothetical privileges that extensions authors would actually find useful. Otherwise they're stuck reading the source code of a small sample of extensions, and extrapolating general patterns of privilege-use from there.) I'm curious, where…

I think the avenue is "writing a blog post, posting it on HN, and having enough people agree with you that it'll stick around on the front page for long enough to expect some Chrome/Safari/Mozilla developer to see it."

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

#174

Post by LikeBeans »

I used the Opera browser for a while then moved to Firefox. One functionality I really missed was the little popup you get when you highlight some text. The popup would let you web search for whatever is highlighted for example. Anyway now on Firefox I made an extension that can do the same thing but then extended it further. At a basic level you can copy to clipboard, do a web search but also can do a Google Maps lookup too.

Often I'm reading a page and I come across some location like a city name or some place around the world or a GPS coordinate. Or something I want to research further. Now I just highlight it then select the appropriate action from the menu that popups up. Through the settings menu you can extend it further and add your own search.

Side note: For web search you can search using whatever search engine you want. Just change the string in the settings menu.

Here's the Firefox version: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-tooltip...

And the Chrome version (yeah had to learn Manifest v3 to port): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/popup-tooltip/opbi...

I use this often and made it for myself... but maybe others find it useful too.

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

#175

Post by paulryanrogers »

qwertox wrote: post #130
weaksauce wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This was my experience as well and the reason I saw myself forced to use the web store. I think there was a time where it was not required, where side loading was ok, but then they changed it and I saw no other way to do it. IIRC there was an alternative way for enterprise users, but I never understood it. That was around 5-7 years ago and I haven't checked if there was a new alternative, easier way to do it nowadays…

Chrome allows permanent side loading, and without signing, if one enables dev mode from extensions page.

Firefox requires uploading to Mozilla for signing to side load permanently or host with them. Though you can self host once signed.

IME Firefox add-ons are approved almost instantly if your addon is not minified or downloading code to execute outside the package. Chrome approvals are always days.

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

#176

Post by dvhh »

From a personal experience, some of the extensions I built were for enhancing productivity for internal tool (with a good amount of userscripts and userstyle ) to reduce the amount of paper cuts in my use case and shared with multiple team with positive feedback before escalating to management so I could get in touch with the team in charge of the tool and suggest the enhancements.

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

#177

Post by quickthrower2 »

nickjj wrote: post #21

If someone is looking for ideas, I'd love an extension that shows if a png image is really transparent instead of being a png or jpg with literal checker box patterns on the image. I tweeted about this once a while back[0], it gained some traction but never materialized. This would save a lot of time trying to find transparent images that turn out to be fake. These types of sites are worse than the "fake" github issu…

I was caught out by this today. My use case is I downloaded an image and realized it was mostly transparent and relied on a certain colour background to show properly. I ended up using the snippet tool in Windows instead to get the image, which was OK for my use case (taking some notes).

In addition, one annoying thing is "save image as" seems to only work on image tags, not images that come from CSS. So I think some kind of image tool that handles these kinds of issues, including the "is transparent" would be quite cool.

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

#178

Post by fregante »

sb8244 wrote: post #161

My favorite chrome extension pattern is state stored in background page that's communicated with injected content scripts via redux + actions. You get a crazy powerful state management model that can allow traditional web pages to feel like SPA (your extension around it at least) It's a shame manifest v3 absolutely butchers this use case because there's no long term live-state management other than opening an extensi…

Look into chrome.storage.session, they created it explicitly to allow in-memory storage for those scenarios. Not as easy as just setting a property, but good enough.

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

#179

Post by quickthrower2 »

fswd wrote: post #23

Any suggestions for a good stack to develop extensions? I'm coming from nodejs/react, and would like to stay close to that. Is there an up-to-date stack I can clone, copy, and deploy with something like 'yarn run build' and start hacking?

Not necessarily a suggestion, but I have used Elm for it :-). The point being, use what you'd use anyway for a website.

That said - with an extension some of your code is about interacting with existing pages. For that, much of the time vanilla JS might be good for compatability, since the page itself is already using X or Y or Z framework.

For the menus, extension page and so on, or complicated UI you want to show on top of a page, you could use React.

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

#180

Post by fregante »

karmelapple wrote: post #158
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...

Only pre-existing MV2 extensions can be updated. New extensions have had to be MV3 for exactly 12 months already: since January 17th 2022.
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