HN Pop-Up: Profile Overlay for HN

Hacker News User Link Pop-up lets you quickly glance at a user's profile without leaving the page you're on.

You can quickly see a user's about, karma and sign up date.

Installation

Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-user-link-pop/clfaigfmebhcgofincgbmofoiomlhbfo

Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-pop-up/

Debugging / Local Installation

Firefox

For some reason, Firefox does not whitelist the domain https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/ under the host_permissions key in the manifest, when we use manifest v3. For that reason, we use the manifest v2 for FireFox. The Firefox configuration is in manifes_ff.json

• Clone or download this repository
• Copy everything from manifest_ff.json into manifest.json
• Go to about:debugging (type in the address bar)
• Click This Firefox > Load Temporary Add-On
• Browse to the extension folder and select manifest.json
• Click Reload after making any code changes

Chrome

• Clone or download this repository
• Go to chrome://extensions (type in the address bar)
• Click "Load Unpacked" and select the extension folder

Functionality

This extension enumerates all user links on a page and attaches a one-shot mouseover event handler to each one.

When the link is hovered over for the first time, it hits the Hacker News API to obtain the profile information: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/${id}.json

Once downloaded, the profile information is formatted into a multi-line string and used as a title of the link a element. Subsequent hovering over the link won't make another network request, instead the existing title attribute value is presented by the browser.

The extension is supported by Chrome and Firefox. Safari support is untested.

Security & Privacy

This extension only has access to https://news.ycombinator.com/* and https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/* and only accesses the page DOM.

It does not access your Hacker News cookies or other personal data in any way.

Community

Feel free to open issues or submit PRs.

To-Do

Test the extension in Safari and submit to Apple's extension store

Safari should support Web Extensions so without any code changes, the same code should work in Safari, too. I have access to macOS Safari so I will test the extension and publish it for the Apple Safari extension store if it indeed works and doesn't cost too much. (I am not sure if the Safari extension store is subject to the Developer fee.)

Come up with a new icon

I am thinking a nicer icon could be possible to make. Something with the HN letters with a masked out silhouette or similar.