Cool idea but I generally like the text-based meritocracy that exists now. I mostly go by post title rather than source. I would bet that I’d be influenced by sources more if I saw the source’s favicon. Just a hypothesis.
I've barely given it any thought, but I am more likely to click into submissions from particular domains already. That said, it's more of a secondary influence to the title.
Agreed, but also sad. In reality, and in our company, Features like this pile up and no one speaks up. Next thing you know, the product becomes a completely deranged version of original intention. People like you don't exist in every org who has a 1) meticulous understanding of the product and what could go wrong 2) Courage to speak up and not offend the people proposing the change 3) Change management's mind who has been sold the feature-full vision of the product.
Greasemonkey injects scripts into the content context [1], which is (arguably) more secure than injecting them directly into the page. From there they run with similar permissions to the extension which installs them. They can't be blocked by the page's CSP settings, and requests they make aren't subject to the same-origin policy. On the other hand, they're isolated from the page, which provides an additional layer of protection from the page accidentally getting access to privileged APIs like GM.xmlHttpRequest, which is a historic issue with user script managers.
ViolentMonkey supports this API, but unfortunately doesn't use it by default. You can enable it with `// @inject-into content` in the header.
Firefox additionally has an API and context specifically for user scripts (the userScript API), but GreaseMonkey doesn't use this unfortunately. A pull request adding support for it to either GM or ViolentMonkey would be nice if someone knowledgeable were so inclined. This API provides some additional protection (scripts are subject to SOP unless the extension breaks them out, and scripts are in addition isolated from each other), so it's a "nice-to-have" but not totally necessary if your user scripts come from trustworthy sources (i.e. you write them yourself).
As an aside, there's Refined Hacker News[0] which seems like it would be a great option for this to be built into. It has lots of great features while keeping things minimal.
But I think there's no need to integrate its functionality to the site. This way one can choose how to customize the site without increasing complexity of the site itself.
Tangent: try to make sure your websites serve the right favicon regardless of whether the user is logged in or not. Its honestly no big deal, but something I noticed writing the favicon service for synth.app (for tabs and such before we can calculate the favicon using the HTML).
For example, the google domains (gmail/cal/drive/etc) all show the same google accounts favicon [1] and we had to special case a few more.
This had the cross origin issue for me. After combining with an above post that uses GM.addElement this looks really nice. Grayscale is the way to go to prevent the site from being more addictive than it needs to be.
Did you know: This happens for each and every user individually, so no danger for the pure design of HN. I like the way it helps me orient where the links lead. I'll keep it for a week to see what changes. Hat tip to the author!
This came in just as I was about to submit my HackerNew extension to the store so I added it as an optional extra. Thanks @frabert!
HackerNew [1] adds a 'hideAll' button to the HN top bar and an 'Open in new tabs' control. This is a minimal, non distracting, change which optimizes my workflow of occasionally visiting HN throughout the day to gather a set of interesting stories to drill into but avoiding re-skimming the same stories on every visit. Source available [2]
I personally have no desire to use it, but I appreciate that it's a significantly more efficient way of providing more info compared to a thumbnail.
This is one of the few places on the web where I'm not utterly overwhelmed by visual clutter, and I genuinely wish more sites had a 'no images/thumbnails' mode like HN.
N.B. this is going to send a request to duck duck go for every link which (a) some people aren't going to like, and (b) DDG might not like (I couldn't find any explicit policy for using their favicon service).
This - an alternative approach could be to create the images with a URL of '{domain}/favicon.ico' and then add an onError event to switch the URL to the DDG URL only for instances where the site's favicon isn't in the default location.
For sure, but even a lot of those sites maintain a favicon.ico to support legacy crawlers/systems - then for those that don't (i.e. trigger onError), falling back to DDG's icon is an easy way to skip all that parsing.
That's true, and if people don't like the idea of sending requests to DDG I completely understand. However regarding the increase in traffic: doing any kind of search on DDG sends a request for each link just like this script does, and I don't think the amount of users that are going to use this script is going to cause major issues. Still, it's a grey area and its use is not endorsed by DDG in any way.
Links usually don't display a favicon next to them only when you open the page the browser tab title does. It'd be pretty cluttered imo if random images were shown in an otherwise text-based environment.
Getting the same error as mentioned in another comment.... might just make it myself later, with some local cache to not blast DuckDuckGo on site refresh
Is anyone who's good with CSS able to modify this to align the icon and text better? The current alignment where the baseline of the text is in line with the bottom of the favicon feels off.
