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Comment by kkaranth | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: @OP I do not see a link to the source for the addon. I think a lot of users would be vary of installing closed-source addons.

This is great, some YouTube features are just so annoying. And I cannot disable them even though I pay for YouTube premium.

An alternative to this is to add this to your ublock origin list:

  www.youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer

it seems to be working, but I do not know if there are any other ramifications. (for instance, I use the rule https://www.google.*/xjs/* to block the "people also search for..." on google.com and I recently realized that that breaks google maps-based search results)

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This addon makes is super easy and convenient to inspect any addon's source code

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/crxviewer/

While this is useful, I won't add add-ons if they don't have a GitHub/gitlab because the barrier to review is significantly more and I shouldn't need to look at the entire extensions source code every time it updates. Could they sneak in a release that's not on the GitHub page? Sure. But as long as I stick with the big add-ons I'll survive.

> closed-source addons

  wget https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/3611176/youtube_distractfree-0.1-an+fx.xpi
  unzip youtube_distractfree-0.1-an+fx.xpi

You'll find yt.css and ytt.js which aren't minimized/obfuscated.

Browser extensions/addons are about as "closed source" as websites, or even less so in most cases (let's ignore wasm-powered websites or extensions for a second). Not linking to a GitHub repository doesn't mean it's "closed source"; conversely, linking to a GitHub repository is no guarantee that what you're getting is what's being linked to, or the extension won't be compromised in a future update.

It's nice that one can do this, but I wish I didn't need to. Mozilla could easily add a way to view the source online. This would be much more convenient and obvious that it's possible.

I wish there was the same for Linux packages, there's been many times where I needed to reference a file that a package installed on another distro, but don't want to go through unzipping it and reading it, especially on mobile.

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