Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • webextensions-examples

    Example Firefox add-ons created using the WebExtensions API

  • Check out Firefox examples on github, you’ll like it, I’ve had great experience learning from them to add nifty features to my browser:

    https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples

  • red-box-outline

    Chrome extension that toggles a red outline around every element on the page

  • I made this extension fully using chatGPT to diagnose some layout issues. It’s super simple but chatGPT was definitely useful setting up the chrome boilerplate (and commenting what each option meant). Make sure you ask it to target the most recent version, they recently changed (to v3?) and it seems chatGPT prefers writing for the old version.

    https://github.com/notzane/red-box-outline

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

    SurveyJS logo
  • score-extension-analytics

    Analytics that Score uses

  • The "read and change all your data" permission is a huge hurdle for our shopping extension, especially since we only need to identify shopping pages. What I've tried to build trust is to open source our tracking analytics (e.g. https://github.com/Score-Extension/score-extension-analytics...).

    Hopefully transparency is one way to overcome this trust barrier.

  • https://github.com/jlawrence6809/CSS-Selector-Helper-for-Chr...

  • https://github.com/jlawrence6809/CSS-Selector-Helper-for-Chr...

  • bookmarklet-platform

    A platform for distributing JS bookmarklets created from GitHub gists

  • How do you "compile" the bookmarklets? I know of https://bookmarkl.ink/ but then we're back trusting some third-party service again. I get that it's not rocket science, but this is definitively a small hurdle to overcome.

  • hoverzoom

    Google Chrome extension for zooming images on mouse hover

  • I will leave this as a gallery of emails with offers to buy extension hoverzoom: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

    Sidenote: The "collaboration" offers come from time to time even to non-extensions projects, if they are reasonably widely used. E.g. simple tools (rather widely used suite of android apps recently sold).

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
  • hackernews-userscript

    Hackernews Userscript wirtten in Rust WASM featuring regex-based filtering and softhide

  • A somewhat-shameless plug here, since I've released this just yesterday:

    Browser Extension for Hacker News written in Rust WASM:

    https://github.com/drakerossman/hackernews-userscript

  • lunabrain

    AI-assisted writing tool.

  • What has always blown my mind is the lack of documentation/open source projects. With such powerful data we come across while browsing the web, it would only make sense to me there would be more tools to use an extend in this space. Browsing history is especially under valued. Even though the data technically exists, it is quite difficult to retrieve pages that have been visited, imo because of poor UX. Most people keep every Internet journey opened in hopes they will remember to return to it. I have been taking a stab at improving the UX with a history browser extension [1] which I have found myself legitimately finding value in using (a first for my personal projects lol).

    [1] https://github.com/lunabrain-ai/lunabrain/tree/main/js/exten...

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts