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Comment by tibbydudeza | Hacker News Reader

IE was so hackable - remember some Chinese firm (Maxthon) built a complete new browser by just embedding Trident and using ActiveX.

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My favorite part of Maxthon was the rendering engine switching, where you got to change between Gecko and Trident, and it looks like even Webkit was supported at one point. This was back when you basically needed to use Netscape/Mozilla for modern standards and IE for sites that absolutely needed it. It seems like the only place in the years following you'd see this would be to get away from IE using forwards compatibility (Chrome Frame) or backwards compatibility (IE Tab in Edge).

Netscape 8 actually supported multiple rendering engines too!

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/netscape-browser

Not just IE - things like MSN Messenger and uxtheme.dll had lots of mods. I also remember greasemonkey (from a bit later of a time) being huge, too.

I wonder why it's less of a thing now. Is it because of the increased difficulty (frequent updates), or is it because there isn't as much need for such mods?

In the case of Discord which would be today's MSN Messenger, it's not often done because your account will be terminated if you are found to be using a modded client.

Lots of people use BetterDiscord (which is EULA compliant afaik) without a problem. Discord is more hackable than anything thanks to the web UI.

The last I heard, BetterDiscord was actually against discord's TOS[0].

[0]: https://nitter.42l.fr/discord/status/908000828690182145

It is, but I've never seen anyone get banned for using it.

Their API is open therefore I don't think they have any right to complain, my homebrew user API for scraping is unbanned and so is BetterDiscord

Their API being freely accessible is irrelevant. If they decided to ban anyone using their API differently from their official client, they would be entirely within their rights. They probably won't though. It'd be a waste of time for them, bad publicity, and would just make the custom clients harder to detect instead of making them go away.

I don't have beef in the game, FWIW. I have greasemonkey loaded in my firefox and inject a bunch of custom mods in various webpages, including discord, to automate various parts of my workflow. Discord could probably detect it and ban me, but I guess so long as I don't use it for nefarious purposes, they won't.

> Discord is more hackable than anything thanks to the web UI.

I thought Discord uses Qt?

It’s electron.

> I wonder why it's less of a thing now... or is it because there isn't as much need for such mods?

I think the popularity of reskinning Windows is because (especially since Windows Vista and Windows 8) the OS is not hideous-by-default.

EDIT: Oh, apparently the main way to patch UxTheme.dll stopped working since the Creators Update: https://github.com/riverar/uxstyle - though I'm sure Stardock's approach still works.

Increasingly difficulty and probably a general lack of interest in really customising one's system, thanks to the overarching paternalistic corporate strategy aimed at taking away control from users and encouraging ignorance.

I did something similar (NetCaptor)… starting in 1997. It’s cool to see that Maxthon is still around.

You the OG - think I used Netcaptor before Firefox came along.

You were my hero back in the day! I remember spending so much time editing the Wikipedia entry for NetCaptor to get it more visibility.

For a LONG time, even after Firefox, NetCaptor was still the best browser around. I used QuickSearch all the time (and still have that habit to this day).

Next to Tim Berners Lee, IMO, you are the web's true unsung hero. THANK YOU a million times for bringing the single biggest improvement to the web browser in two decades.

you are still my hero…

Get out of here CB

Adam! NetCaptor had the best browser user experience ever. Thank you! :)

"IE was so hackable"

For every meaning of that word, yes.

I remember something like this called Avant Browser.

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