Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For your next side project, make a browser extension

geoffreylitt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 286 posts

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

#111

Post by qwertox »

It's not a quick hack for a personal project.

You have to sign up to the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard and agree to all the terms and conditions, semi-publish the extension to a limited group of people (probably only yourself), and AFAIK you need to be logged in as one of the group members in order to be able to then see the webstore page of the extension and install it.

In order to update a small issue you need to submit a new version and wait for approval and hope that your account doesn't get flagged because you're using the extension to store all your (tab-)history into a custom database.

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

#113

Post by CodexArcana »

qwertox wrote: post #111

It's not a quick hack for a personal project. You have to sign up to the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard and agree to all the terms and conditions, semi-publish the extension to a limited group of people (probably only yourself), and AFAIK you need to be logged in as one of the group members in order to be able to then see the webstore page of the extension and install it. In order to update a small issue you ne…

If your intentions are to only use the extension for yourself, why not just side load it?

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

#114

Post by throwaway675309 »

65 wrote: post #2

A lot of the most useful software I've made for myself has been browser extensions. Spend too much time on Hacker News? I made an extension to freeze the front page so it updates once every 6 hours. Spend too much time on Reddit? I made an extension requiring a password to be input for every page I visit. Want to extensively filter LinkedIn jobs, and track which jobs you've applied to? I made an extension to apply ve…

There's a good chance a lot of these plug-ins could be vastly simplified and just written as user scripts in Tampermonkey, so you might want to look into that.

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

#115

Post by cpeterso »

tech234a wrote: post #62
conqrr wrote: post #15

Chrome Extension Developer experience was the worst. A week of wait of approvals, Management of extension packages isn't great. Rejects on image formats etc. Firefox hasn't yet adopted Manifest V3 which is also a bummer. After all this, I still managed to put up Selaro which is a workplace links organizer: https://getselaro.com

Manifest V3 support is coming to Firefox on Tuesday with the release of Firefox 109.

For more details, see Mozilla’s November announcement about MV3 in Firefox 109:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi...

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

#116

Post by weaksauce »

CodexArcana wrote: post #113
qwertox wrote: post #111

It's not a quick hack for a personal project. You have to sign up to the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard and agree to all the terms and conditions, semi-publish the extension to a limited group of people (probably only yourself), and AFAIK you need to be logged in as one of the group members in order to be able to then see the webstore page of the extension and install it. In order to update a small issue you ne…

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.

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

#117

Post by alphabet9000 »

64392947 wrote: post #78
alphabet9000 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firefox/mozilla doesn't really make it easy (compared to chrome) mozilla now requires "add-on signing" [0]; extensions now have to be "signed" (By mozilla) before you can permanently side-load your own private extension onto regular firefox. they also require you to use 2FA [1] when setting up a firefox.com account (which is required in order for you to upload extensions so they can be signed). at least with chrome y…

I can understand why the first example is burdensome and don't have any quarrel with it but I can't help but lack sympathy for the second example. If your barrier as a developer is setting up 2FA I can't help but doubt you ever cared much about supporting Firefox anyway. This is like a taxi driver complaining about needing to have proof of insurance and a driver's license.

i very much care about supporting firefox users. for example, i maintain a separate, mozilla-signed, manifest v2 version of an extension i made [0] just so firefox users can keep using it. i do so even though this compromises my own ideals about not wanting to use 2FA out of principle.

[0] https://github.com/fanfare/googleimagesrestored/releases

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

#118

Post by tectonic »

caseyw wrote: post #102
tectonic wrote: post #83

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…

That’s a very cool piece of tech right there. Has in evolved much since then?

Mostly with a bunch of handy quick tools that in the past I would have put in bookmarklets.

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

#119

Post by strken »

qwertox wrote: post #107
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…

I know this hurts as a developer, but using this language is just a way of being sincere to the user.

As a user it's not that helpful when extensions which inject stuff into the page (lots of them) all say they can access your history and browsing data. Even though it's actually true, it feels like a gap in the permissions model.

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

#120

Post by purplecats »

beambot wrote: post #3
65 wrote: post #2

A lot of the most useful software I've made for myself has been browser extensions. Spend too much time on Hacker News? I made an extension to freeze the front page so it updates once every 6 hours. Spend too much time on Reddit? I made an extension requiring a password to be input for every page I visit. Want to extensively filter LinkedIn jobs, and track which jobs you've applied to? I made an extension to apply ve…

> I do wish the Chrome extension API wasn't so annoying to use. Each time I make an extension I sort of dread the process since it's not a good developer experience, but I always find the result to be very useful in my day-to-day life. Sounds like the making of a good lifestyle SaaS product.

can you elaborate?
Post reply on HN