nileshtrivedi / better Goto Github PK

hotmail.com
Hotmail Mail
Hotmail is awesome, this is a test!

I don't have a lot of experience with building extensions, but I think to make the creation of UI elements easier we can use something like Preact or Handlebars?

They might even help with creating better Options/Settings page, and Extension Icon Popup in the future like this:

https://www.kooapp.com/
KOO APP
alternative to twitter micro blogging made in India

hotmail.com
Hotmail Mail
Proton is awesome
This is a test

This will be good for decentralization and separates content from the software. Here is how uBlock does it:

Some code refactoring will be needed for this. Also, in the pop-up, we should then show the source of recommendation.

This is not urgent. We should first build one high-quality list as per #7. And then revisit this if users demand it (or managing our own list causes governance issues).

I see that this project has been migrated onto Codeberg. Is it planned to move there or will it stay on GitHub?

https://opensports.org
Open Sports
Sports alternative for Meetup.com

I installed the addon but it does not seem to work.
When opening pages from the list (slack.com, ...) there's no popup that shows me alternatives.
Also the addon does not appear as an icon next to my other addons. Maybe that's related to the issue.
Version: 0.1.1 - updated 01.09.20

https://www.protonmail.com
ProtonMail

https://duckduckgo.com/
DuckDuckGo
Privacy respecting search engine

https://fosssearch.com
Foss Search
Foss search is truly open source

hotmail.com
Hotmail Mail
Testing is awesome

For flexibility in terms of UI, Options, and other future features we should probably make the schema more normalised

[
	{
		"evilUrl": "https?:\/\/(www.)?google.com\/chrome",
		"betterUrl": "https://mozilla.com",
		"betterText": "Mozilla Firefox",
		"betterDescription": "Firefox is open source, backed by the Mozilla Foundation".
		"betterHow": [
			"ethical", "privacy-focused", "random-tag"
		],
	}
]

This should also help mitigate #3

https://better.reads
Better Reads
Its better, federated and all around awesome!

We can try to get real users and their feedback by posting on these sites.

I'm not sure if now is the right time. We should probably wait till the default list is a bit more useful?

Once dismissed, popup should not be shown on the same url/domain. Use cookies or localStorage for this.

Indentations are currently mixed 2/4 spaces in the js files.

I think the standard nowadays is to use 2 spaces as the indentation.

Prettier by default also uses 2 space indents.

Should we give this a thought?

Choosing what to recommend can be a tricky subject, and the pros and cons of various options are more than can be expressed in a small popup. Thus I believe that it would be better to use a third-party list of replacements. That way you can link to a more complete explanation and simply worry about the browser extension rather than the politics of recommending certain replacements. It also allows the users to more reasonably consider the alternatives instead of making a judgement based on a short phrase.

I like how this extension often recommends switching.software. I believe this would be a good precedent to extend to the other recommendations as well.

At the moment, the better suggestions take up a large amount of real estate on the screen. This makes regular surfing/browsing hard. There is a close button and I can get rid of the better popup. When I'm on a new page my first intention is to see the content of the page and so I tend to hit this close button. When I'm doing something like an intense session of google searches, I'd have to repeatedly close the popup. So, the option in front of me would be to press "do not show suggestions for this URL".

But, it is just that I don't have the time to look at suggestions at this moment. I'm definitely interested in the suggestions, but just not now. Not straightaway. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe some other day.

So, I think there are two things that might be helpful:

1. "Do not show suggestions for this URL for the next n hours"
2. A smaller popup in the corner of the screen which doesn't hide the content of the page, but can be expanded to see the actual suggestions.

The better popup is formatting differently on different sites as it's inherting css.

We should be able to stop this by setting some default styles on the root div of our popup.

I was thinking of shipping with a default list that recommends ethical / independent / privacy-protective alternatives (such as Hey.com or ProtonMail.com instead of Gmail.com).

It would be nice if organizations like IFF or EFF can take over this extension later. But other use-cases are possible: Bypassing paywalls using LibGen/SciHub, finding discounts and cheaper deals.

As suggested by @anirudhvarma12 we can use a scrolling div or limit the number of entries shown to 3-4

Destination URLs should be able to take params from the current URL. For eg: if you are visiting a particular book on Amazon.com whose ISBN can be picked from the URL, the same ISBN can be passed on to the alternatives like OpenLibrary. This can be done by using named captures in the regexp which seems to be supported in Javascript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions/Groups_and_Ranges

This will be useful for directly taking the user to exactly the right destination from a large set (products, books, research papers, or anything that comes from a large set and has a somewhat portable identifier).

Dynamic templating in pure JS can be achieved with a helper function like this:

const templateString = "Hello ${this.name}!";
const templateVars = {
    name: "world"    
}

const fillTemplate = function(templateString, templateVars){
    return new Function("return `"+templateString +"`;").call(templateVars);
}

console.log(fillTemplate(templateString, templateVars));

Because this extension ships with a default list of alternatives, I think orgs like these would be best placed to maintain the quality of that list. Others can of course build alternative lists. Hosting with such orgs should also help with user confidence and therefore, adoption.

EFF already hosts a few tech tools related to privacy: https://www.eff.org/pages/tools

I will ping the folks at EFF, IFF, FSF, Mozilla etc to see if they'd be interested.

https://protonmail.com
Proton mail
high security and privacy in a growing email service ! from the team behind proton VPN.

@anirudhvarma12

In firefox the popup is looking like this:

Adding scrollbar-width: none; fixes it. Maybe we can do this if time permits, not an important issue.

Projects like switching.software, and others recommended in #7 are already doing the hard work of maintaing better suggestions.

We should write a script which imports from their data source to ours.

The importers can be made to run using Github actions CRON scheduling and to create a PR if there is a change detected.

Inside the popup, we want to give an explanation, as well as the names and links of 1 or more alternatives. Current solution is to replace innerHTML but that can enable XSS attacks. Need to think of and implement a better approach.

We can have a popup UI from the extensions button (in the browser toolbar) to open where users of better can suggest an alternative for the current URL.

A simple web service running which grabs these suggestions from all our users (completely anonymously). I'd be happy to host it on one of my servers.

I think the entire strength of this extension lies in the better list, so this could help us get there much faster?

This also adds a more engaging element of "Help build a better internet", as we will actively be taking user recommendations.

Currently, the user can only subscribe to one remote list via the options UI:

While the code for changing this value seems to work, I haven't tested it for robustness. And eventually, we want to support multiple lists. Check #8 Here is how uBlock does it:

fixes #23

The current icon is really beautiful and minimalistic. However, for browsers that use a dark theme (a very popular choice these days), the icon is not visible at all and it becomes hard to interact through the extensions menu or URL bar.

An icon-based on a more prominent color that goes well with both light and dark themes would be more suited and make it easier for users to find the extension amidst others.