Three unofficial Metafilter web-extensions
September 25, 2017 7:06 AM   Subscribe

Three unofficial Metafilter web-extensions
Rewrites of three existing Metafilter Greasemonkey scripts in web extension format.

Last week Firefox Developer updated to version 57 and, suddenly, all of the addons that were no longer compatible with Mozilla's new web extension programme stopped working. Developers still have a couple of months before the door closes to get their addons compatible for Firefox Standard but it meant, for the rest of us early-birds, useful addons that used to work no longer did. Including GreaseMonkey and all of the great scripts that made Metafilter a bit more usable.

So to keep myself busy, and also learn something new, I decided to rewrite three of the existing Metafilter Greasemonkey scripts - the ones I use on a regular basis - as web extensions, and I have placed these in a collection on the Mozilla site for anybody to download and install.

metafilter-favouriteers is a rewrite of Michael Devore's Howls Of Outrage script that allows users to mouseover a comment favourites link in posts to show who favourited it (capped at 150 favourites due to display limitations). This works in Firefox. It does not work in Chrome because Chrome kicks up a fuss about the way Metafilter handle JSON requests behind-the-scenes (non-HTTPS redirects).

metafilter-favisualised is a rewrite of Jordan Reiter's Metafilter MultiFavorited Multiwidth script to add a favourites visual cue to post comments on Metafilter. This works in both Chrome and Firefox.

metafilter-navigator is a rewrite of the script (a number of different developers over the years - 1, 2) that provides additional changes to the Metafilter UI to make navigation easier. This works in both Chrome and Firefox.

All three extensions work in all the areas of the site that have comments including the more recent Fanfare, and Podcasts.

The collection is available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/andyuws/metafilter/

The source code is available here: metafilter-favouriteers | metafilter-favisualised | metafilter-navigator
Role: Developer
posted by urbanwhaleshark (5 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite

First off, thanks for this work! But note that Greasemonkey is working on a webextensions-compatible version.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:43 AM on September 25, 2017


Ha, yes. As I mentioned this project was partly to give me something to do. But I also realised that I only really used GM for these scripts and nothing else, so I thought it would be better to just have some small individual extensions (they're all around only 30-40k), than have a big extension loaded with a load of scripts.

Also, I'm not sure how far along GM are with their v4 release, but they were still inviting comments from developers on how to proceed at the end of August. I think they're still some way off having a compatible version.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 10:21 AM on September 25, 2017


BTW, any problems/bugs please feel free to log those as issues against the corresponding git repo.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 5:43 AM on September 29, 2017




thank you!!!
posted by rebent at 3:47 PM on November 26, 2017


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