mfrisbie

What an unmitigated disaster. Anyone who has been following the MV3 transition saw this coming from a mile away. When I wrote the MV3 chapter for "Building Browser Extensions", it was nearly impossible to commit to any content because there was so little clarity or direction.

I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill, but given the state of things, who has any confidence in what the future of browser extensions holds?

I suspect there's a chicken and egg effect with pricing and blind tasting. Someone who can identify wines blind surely knows how much each region/producer/style costs, and based on that would assign a guessed price. Example: Paulliac is expensive, this tastes like a Paulliac, therefore wines that taste this must also be expensive.

I took the introductory sommelier exam as a hobbyist, but I was in a room with ~200 people in the industry. We collectively blind tasted about a dozen wines, and I watched as people around me mostly guessed correctly with astonishing accuracy.

There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your senses. It's important to note that the CMS only includes traditionally produced wines in the blind tasting - no curveballs (pinot grigio grown in Alaska or whatever).

The change that gets the most attention is the shift away from blocking webRequest to declarativeNetRequest, but other important changes are moving from background pages to service workers, and disallowing third party JS.

Service workers are particularly problematic for some extensions, as the background script cannot execute indefinitely. I included an entire chapter on mv2->mv3 since there was so much to cover.

I found the lack of examples and mv2/mv3 fragmentation to be very irritating. For example, the Omnibox API is awesome - yet look at the documentation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/omnib... . It barely scrapes the surface of what it should or can do.

If you're looking to get back on the horse, check out Plasmo https://www.plasmo.com/. It's by far the best and easiest platform for building and deploying extensions.

Thanks! It should be available sometime next week.

The best mv2 repository would of course be ublock origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock The best mv3 repository would be AdGuard's https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardMV3

For a generalized ad blocker, importing and updating filter lists is probably the most challenging bit. https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters AdGuard has an amazing blog, their content is impressively broad and deep https://adguard.com/en/blog/how-ad-blocking-is-done.html

Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3.

I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy things they can do, and I put the best ones into a demo extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browser-extension-....

I was frustrated with the lack of resources, so I'm publishing a book on it: "Building Browser Extensions". Available later this year. https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/

And check out the companion extension: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/b2x

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Author of the 4th edition here!

Much credit goes to the author of previous editions, Nicholas Zakas, for dictating the style. He offered this advice when I began the new edition:

I tried to make it a book that had a distinctive approach, which is that it didn't treat the reader with kid gloves and went deep into technical details to people could really understand the language. This, more than anything else, is what people have told me they enjoyed about the book. It was unapologetically not for beginners.

More than anything else, this advice is what guided me in preserving the original style in the new edition.

Fantastic article! I would add that it is quite impossible to hold the contents of an entire book in your head at once. I rely heavily on Trello and OneNote for mental organization of topics.

It's also critical to form a topic pipeline as you go about writing. Unfailingly, writers will come across articles or blog posts that contain something new they'd like to include in their text. Efficiently taking raw content, boiling it down into its essence, and composing that concept into a book section is important for keeping your book content fresh and relevant.

Jerry Seinfeld said it best:

"Now why did we invent the helmet? Well, because we were participating in many activities that were cracking our heads. We looked at the situation. We chose not to avoid these activities, but to just make little plastic hats so that we can continue our head-cracking lifestyles."

Exact same thing happened to me, I documented the entire experience: https://medium.com/@mattfriz/postmortem-someone-cloned-my-bo...

A spot of satire to go along with this: https://alwaystrend.in/articles/interview-question-what-happ...

Sometimes your inner desires to rewrite it from scratch can be overwhelming.

https://alwaystrending.io/articles/software-engineer-enterta...

Take home projects strike me as an overcorrection for the perceived problems with whiteboard interviews. Drawing from a recent sample of interviews, companies that ask for them still seem to be in the minority.

I hope this remains the case, as 1) they are an enormous time suck for the applicant, and 2) demonstrate abilities that a qualified applicant could become proficient at quickly. Qualification for a position requiring these abilities can be assessed in a way that is not so one-sided against the applicant.

Related: https://alwaystrending.io/articles/tech-interview-torture-ch...

Yes. Irrespective of who posts my content, the links are consistently bumped from the top of the front page.

No humor allowed on HN I suppose. Their loss.

Author here. I'm both pleased and dismayed to see this is as relevant as it was when I wrote it a year ago.

Obviously, this piece is satire. When giving interviews, I do whatever I can to make the candidate walk out of there with a smile whether they did well or not. I stand by the idea that it should be possible to entirely assess someone's ability without ripping their guts out or making them sweat.

I'm the author - thank you! Always great to hear positive feedback. Most of what's been said here stems from truth in their publishing process. They do seem to churn out a large amount of content, and I sense that their higher quality titles stem from the author having to make the push for excellence.

These types of articles are great, but too frequently I see phrases such as, "It makes testing much simpler" sprinkled throughout them without any justification. These claims are generally not untrue, but it seems like it would be appropriate to demonstrate scenarios of the unit and e2e tests actually being affected by decisions in the application code.

At face value, seems like it could be interesting, but there's a lot to be skeptical about. How can I be sure that I'm doing the test correctly without independent verification? Even with their "anti-cheating" instructions, I still wouldn't completely trust myself. Also, it doesn't seem like there's a way to verify if the results are accurate or not. Even if they are off by 1%, getting an inaccurate prescription (and consequently glasses/contacts) would be a totally unacceptable outcome for a service like this.

Unlike services like https://www.plushcare.com/ which use consumer devices as a subsitute for the office visit, Opternative seems to be using the consumer devices to replace the office visit, the doctor, and the traditional eye examination devices, and this seems a bit dubious to me.

On the other hand, if this service actually can consistently deliver, that would be so, so awesome.

We work with a home-rolled solution. What don't you like about it?

Sorry! That was a brainfart on my part. The git command is fixed now.

You can email me directly at matt at thinkster dot io

The tutorial explains only what you need to know about the base to get started. If I explained the entire boilerplate of the MEAN stack, the tutorial would become a monstrosity.

I get a lot of requests to expand the tutorial with other frameworks, as you mentioned. Ultimately, the tutorial itself will be structured in a way that allows for the best presentation of concentrated learning. However, this doesn't mean that we won't be releasing other content covering integration with other frameworks.

That was one of the first things I noticed when examining the MEAN stack. The final version of the tutorial will take care of this flaw.

Believe me, a big testing section is on the way.