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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

this is something I'd pay to be addressed in most companies / institutions.

Every tool they buy (physical or digital) is always 60% fit, but adding a few bits on top would propel it above 80% and make everybody's days a bliss.

Most applications I've seen are designed for generic tasks, except that workers have a very regular set of tasks, if software could be tailored a bit to this (prefill stuff, save clicks) you cut fatigue and errors buy a huge figure.

This can have a serious social impact, last gig there were thousands of lawsuits waiting in a hall because nobody wants to type them in since the software requires to rewrite everything from scratch even if 80% of the data is identical.

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This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product.

Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.

Potentially only, where i work, browsers are managed by IT, no way to patch stuff, no devtools. Also depending on the design, adding your code may never work unless you reverse the whole codebase (the app in place is extremely stateful, all a.href are replaced by procedural js calls).

Don't laugh but I had more results scripting mouse/keyboard automation on 90s oracle GUIs [0] than the app I mentioned above.

[0] I could prefill half the stuff and help the rest with powershell, it gave me 70% time reduction on most tasks

Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking!

    <flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances>
      The job market's great right now
    </flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances>

:-)

Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.

I don't mind the comment above, he's somehow right that html/js is more open to ad-hoc patches than native code. Except when admins forbid you to.

bookmarklets don't allow for injections into the app so it wont work

I'd be interested in seeing implementation examples of adding 3rd party data from one (3rd party) web source to another for form completion, if you have them please?

Presumably this has to hack around cross-site restrictions nowadays (it's a couple of years since I did any website JavaScript).

Extensions can request a higher level of permisions so you typically wont run into that issue.

Here's one i made just now: https://gist.github.com/craigjperry2/83b81b7eaf5cf68ca042a9a...

1. Clone that repo

2. Run my fake vendor app - in this case an html page with an empty text box - npx http-server

3. Add the browser extension - tested in firefox - then refresh the page

Now you should see the title fields from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts in a dropdown that's now been added to the input field of the fake vendor app page.

This is an advantage of open-source (as in source that you can read and modify, not necessarily FOSS), not web, IMO. Webapps are just necessarily open-source (at least the client-side portion).

Yeah i suppose, if everyone switched to rendering on a canvas element instead of to the DOM then this advantage would shrink away

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