Ask HN: What browser extensions have you built for yourself?

26 points by mpatobin 8 years ago | 25 comments

stefanpie 8 years ago |

My highschool ( I just graduated) has a some sort of gradebook management software used by the teachers / admin / parents / students to view and manage grades, attendence, payment, and so on. The frameowkr used is down kind of convoluted framework Enterprise software combination that the school purchased. And for some reason the school let us see our points erned on ecah assignment out of the total but only showed the letter grade and not the percent for the class. So calculating weighted grades by hand to figure out your class percent was a huge pain for everyone (and some teachers didn't like if you asked them.to show you your percent which they had access too). So one of the first experiences I had writing stuff with js and web technologies was writing an extension to take in all the grades, parse them, and calculate grades based on percents imputed for weighted catagories. Everyone thought it was cool and it became a big thing. I was even super stoked when I got it to save and load the weights using chrome local storage so you don't have to input it everytime. Even though it's pretty simple software, it was my first experience seing the actual impact on my peers every day by some price of software I write.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tripoli/jmiafjndie...

matt-tingen 8 years ago |

Not extensions, but I have a few userscripts I use to fix minor annoyances with various websites:

- Netflix - Skip intros and quickly go to next episode

- Github - Linkify branch names in PRs

- Yelp - Open directions in a new tab rather than a modal

https://github.com/matt-tingen/userscripts

karakanb 8 years ago |

I had built and published 4 different Chrome extensions:

- Random Facts: a random fact about numbers with a beautiful image on new tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-facts-on-ne...

- Game of Thrones Quotes: a random GoT quote on every new tab. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/game-of-thrones-qu...

- Open Wikipedia: an extension to overcome the Wikipedia blocks in Turkey. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-a%C3%A7%...

- Open Imgur: an extension to overcome the Imgur blocks in Turkey. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imgur-a%C3%A7%C4%B...

All of the extensions are open source; the links can be found in the extension descriptions.

techniko 8 years ago |

I made an extension for my teachers that let them put a Google Doc onto Google Classroom, from the Google Doc. It's weird how Google doesn't have that built in, but it means that my teachers don't have to open up a new tab and go through the process, they can just do it from the Doc. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/share-doc-to-...

I also made an extension that opens the current page (or link/video/image) in a popup window. Because I have so many tabs sometimes I just want one window, and it does it. I have options for half/third/full screen size so I can have them side by side (as well as just dragging to resize the window). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/focus-popup/

I also made an extension that fixed a specific issue on Apple Intranet Wikis playing videos in Chrome, but that Wiki system isn't used anymore.

Usually my extensions are just to fix minor problems/annoyances.

pdp19 8 years ago |

I ported Alisdair McDiarmid's bookmarklet[1] to an add-on that will hide sticky content on a site. There was already a Chrome equivalent, but nothing for Firefox. It can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/ It's especially handy these days with the influx of cookie/GDPR agreement overlays, or app download dickbars[2].

[1] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ [2] https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

cvs268 8 years ago |

Deep Thought Tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-thought-...

Adds funny, profound observations in newly opened empty tabs, with fresh images each time.

    - WebExtension written in plain JavaScript. No libraries. No cruft.
    - Displays "deep-thoughts" even in offline-mode (no background-images).
    - Fetches relevant fresh background images each-time from Unsplash and Flickr.

Checkout the source to learn how to create simple webextension addons for Firefox in JavaScript.

Few interesting bits of code:

    * Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm.
    * Ken-Burns effect for still images.
    * Visual (image-preview) tooltips in CSS.
    * Asynchronous XMLHttpRequest.

chewz 8 years ago |

Bing Wallpaper for ChromeOS

https://github.com/chew-z/Bing-Wallpaper-for-ChromeOS

Augment - simple reminder that Google is a Big brother

https://github.com/chew-z/Augment

Foogle - fool Google - my fork of TrackMeNot - which pollutes your search history with possible but random searches....

https://github.com/chew-z/Foogle

NewTab - custom new tab page

https://github.com/chew-z/NewTab

slow_donkey 8 years ago | |

This seems sightly masochistic

slow_donkey 8 years ago |

https://github.com/choyg/ChromeNotis

Notifications toggle. The code is comically simple but it's the one extension besides adblocking I regularly use.

slow_donkey 8 years ago | |

So simple that I actually didn't know any js when I wrote this which has become quite clear to me when rereading the source

dani_c 8 years ago |

Used to love playing dice on various crypto sites. Always have been in awe at those custom dice bots that people have built on Chrome.

And I've noticed that there isn't one for Edgeless (dice & blackjack with 0% edge), and so I've created a dice bot that allows a multiple steps martingale strategy.

It's open source and 100% free, give it a roll!

Github repo: https://github.com/Whatzhub/edgeless-dicebot

EDG DiceBot 1st Run! https://youtu.be/CUqNCWi6pPA

lutostag 8 years ago |

https://github.com/lutostag/webextension-formsave

It saves what you write in textareas so it doesn't get lost when something goes awry.

When the old-style Firefox extensions were going to be deprecated, I went through my installed ones, picked one that wasn't built yet and started from scratch.

The most interesting/difficult part was getting CI setup for both Firefox and Chrome with the always changing landscape of support for extensions in selenium.

vrk7bp 8 years ago |

A friend and I have been building some small tools that make it a little easier to make better investment decisions (and to get some experience with some different frameworks and technologies).

We released this extension recently to make it easy to jot down quick notes and keep track of stock prices.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yogi-invest-more-w...

rchakra3 8 years ago |

I realized I was spending a whole bunch of time tracking down web references for my grad school assignments (and forgetting most of them) so I made something super simple that generated them from my bookmarks:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks-to-refer...

seanwilson 8 years ago |

I made https://www.checkbot.io/ to check for SEO, security and speed best practices on websites. Most tools only check for a small number issues or one page at a time whereas this extension crawls from page to page checking your whole website.

timpetri 8 years ago |

Not much of an extension but I created a simplistic dark chrome theme to go with the dark menu bar on macOS.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode-theme-fo...

poerhiza 8 years ago |

Firefox web extension to save a page's content as an image (save recipts, etc).

https://github.com/grafie/acceptum/tree/master/firefox/dist

elkali 8 years ago |

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jump-to-hn/fopjleg...

Read HN discussions on any article.

jvanveen 8 years ago |

https://github.com/VoIPGRID/vialer-js/

A softphone built on top of Sip.js and Vue. It also runs in a webpage or as an Electron app.

DSKX 8 years ago |

Google Search, Tumblr and some other.

BTW, do you use apps to build extensions?

Not wysiwyg but sort of wysiwyg? I don't mean IDE.

aasz 8 years ago |

I built a WhatsApp Web bot which runs as a Chrome extension, recently made the code public.

https://github.com/aalsuwaidi/wabot

random_coder 8 years ago |

I noticed I spend too much time reading wikipedia articles, jumping from one to another, so I built a chrome extension to limit that browsing time to a few minutes per day.

joshmn 8 years ago |

I wrote one to get my Chipotle faster, back when Chipotle's online ordering didn't validate the order time server-side.

meagher 8 years ago |

extension that allows you to quickly block sites when you’re trying to focus.

https://github.com/tmm/block-fox

jlevers 8 years ago |

I made an extension to make Photobucket photos visible again, since last year Photobucket suddenly put all their photos behind a huge paywall last year, and destroyed a lot of knowledge on forums that I use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-embedd...

- WebExtension written in plain JavaScript. No libraries. No cruft. - Displays "deep-thoughts" even in offline-mode (no background-images). - Fetches relevant fresh background images each-time from Unsplash and Flickr.