Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the 12th such Chrome plugin we have seen now. We released ours a couple of days after frictionless sharing was announced.

The extension gets complicated when you attempt to get it working for all variety of apps, because app developers are constantly updating the DOM to bypass our filters.

See this previous thread for details when another one of these was announced:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810897

see our original project and the code we have so far to getting this to work with other social apps:

https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless

I really wish we could have one project that works in all cases, rather than 12 projects that work in 5% of cases.

We are catching around 50% of cases at the moment with this code:

https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/f...

but it is moving all the time. I am currently in the process of writing a generic rule engine that can be updated from outside of the extension (compare this to just searching on uiconnect.php in links).

Feel free to fork and contribute to existing code (I can't imagine that one of these previous projects wouldn't have come up if you Google searched).

I think one issue with finding projects working on this already is that its hard to explain the concept to search for. Is this Facebook feature called "social reader"? Is it called "frictionless sharing?" "Open graph?" Users don't know how to name the feature in a way to search meaningfully for a way to block it, and there's no standard name among developers to search for preexisting efforts to contribute to.

I managed to find the "Unsocial Reader" while searching for previous efforts. I did not find "Frictionless", maybe because I didn't search for "frictionless sharing blocker," because that's not a term I thought to use.

In the case of Unsocial Reader, I saw it was doing Google "I'm feeling lucky" searches based on the title and figured the way I was doing it was more streamlined for the user because it was actually based on the article URL, and since my extension searches for a URL specific to Facebook (uiconnect.php) no changes to the DOM by app developers would bypass the fact that it still has to go through that Facebook URL.

In terms of cases it covers, it has worked every time I needed it to while I was on Facebook, but yes that was the extent of the testing I did. I think it is unfair to claim that all other projects besides your own work in only 5% of cases, considering the Unsocial Reader has almost 3x the users of Frictionless and a better star rating in the Chrome Web Store. Also, since a few sites represent the vast majority of the open graph links on Facebook (ex Yahoo), blocking their installers is most important to most users.

This was a weekend project of the mentality "I can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort." It's something I threw together, just to solve my own problems (with Facebook and with being unable to find a plugin that fixed the problem). But now that Frictionless has been brought to my attention, I will certainly look over the source and see if there's a way I can contribute. Thanks.

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