161–170 of 286 posts
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 extension tab.
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…
> 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…
Web3 services like MetaMask are primary examples which should have these big warnings, because crypto is rife with scams where someone does something (e.g. open an AirDrop, save their seed phrase in Google Drive) which gives an attacker access to their account without realizing. I don't doubt MetaMask is legit, but you want people to be diligent and understand that whenever they hook up one of these apps to their wallet they are giving a lot of potential for it to be compromised, so maybe be careful and honestly maybe use less of them.
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...
So it's awkward until Firefox MV3 is ready.
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?
Tampermonkey can change what's on the web page, but extensions can do much more than that, e.g. add toolbar menus and items to the context menu, add keyboard shortcuts, manage bookmarks, and so on. (See the API guide for an overview [1]) 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…
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…
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
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’d love to see how these things are architected. Do you have them on GitHub? Are there any boilerplates or anything you recommend to get started?