Show HN: I made a browser extension that fixes Hacker News' block formatting

Am I "missing" something? I don't get those scrollbar comment layout... Where is the problem being fixed?

Here is the correct fix for that:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lines starting with four spaces are for code, not for quotations. In that situation you usually really do want a horizontal scroll bar rather than line wrapping, and this breaks that for actual code. That's also why it uses a fixed width font, which makes no sense at all for quotations.

Hacker News is deliberately very light on formatting, and I prefer it that way. The only thing that needs fixing is a bit of user education not to misuse the block formatting feature. Maybe there should be a list of formatting options below the reply box, with the idea of just sticking a text annotation on quotations mentioned explicitly. (A comment preview would also be nice, mostly so you could read your comment back in a proportional-width font before you post it.)

I'm on mobile and I don't see any problems

To my knowledge, you can't. You can use many, if not most, Firefox addons on mobile (I use ublock on FF mobile, which is nice). This extension is for Firefox.

I'm not really sure if Firefox addons/extensions work well in iOS. I can imagine a few reasons it might be more limited, but I don't have an iPhone to test.

Describing your advocacy against the official position as “fixing” is playing political games with framing and will worsen the site experience for the rest of us as users install and use it.

The official policy says:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

> This is intended for code.