Show HN: Gmelius, Towards a Better Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gmelius, Towards a Better Gmail

chrome.google.com

34 pointsxpressyoo17 comments

This seems nice, but the permissions are scary. Giving access to "your data on *.google.com and mail.google.com" to get a slightly better UI is a hard proposition to accept. I wish Chrome had more fine-grained permissions, like "you give this extension permission to modify the stylesheet on xyz.com, but not to access your data"."

Yes, you're right. A better granularity on the permission settings would be a nice feature to add in the webstore. Just to comment on this point, "Your tabs and browsing activity" comes from the fact that the extension modifies the style and UI of Gmail within your browser and so needs to know whether Gmail is open in your browser (i.e. tabs) to apply those changes, nothing more. To make things clear, Gmelius will never access, read, store, or transmit your personal data.

To inject a content script, you just need permission to access that site.

And if you're injecting a script, you can read all the data off that page.

But you don't need "tabs" aka "Your tabs and browsing activity".

I doubt that would make things a lot safer. With permission to modify only the stylesheet, one could already change the login form to phish your password.

How? I agree that something like that would be risky (you could style the delete button to say "reply"), but I'm not sure how you could do that. Stylesheets can't change a form's action.

I was thinking it would be possible by crafting pseudo elements to a replacement login form, but after reading some more that actually does not seem possible. Maybe one could make the email composition form look like the login form under some conditions.

On the other hand, reddit allows people to upload stylesheets for their subreddits, they only re-host the images in them and that seems to have worked out well.

Is this even allowed? Honestly, I am curious how this got approved. I really like it, but I worry that Google is going to see this and pull it from the website with a "Nope nope nope."

Towards a better google reader chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fdnglondfcmoiakaol...

Google makes money by displaying ads, and they do so in a fairly unobtrusive way. Why are some people so determined not to provide anything in return to the company that offers them a valuable service?

My GMail inbox looks quite similar, and I just use custom blocking using Adblock Plus (Right click on a div and block).

Tried installing. It gives "Invalid Manifest file". I am on Chrome 17.0.963.46

now this is interesting - it removes google ads.

how long until google blocks this? it defeats the purpose of their free gmail service after all...

Adblock has been in the chrome store forever and Adblock blocks google ads across the interweb and not just on gmail.

Do you really think that ad impressions are the driving force behind gmail?

I doubt they will, seeing as how they've never blocked this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc...

If you ask the question in the light of "how many people use this, compared to active Gmail users?" (11,616 vs ~ 200 million [1] = .006%), and then ask "how much is it worth to block this?" (probably a very small number), I personally come up with "a very very long time, if ever" for your "how long until..." question.

[1]: http://www.quora.com/Gmail/How-many-total-active-Gmail-users...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com