Implementing Wordle in the Firefox address bar | Hacker News Reader

Implementing Wordle in the Firefox address bar

eieio.games

208 pointssurprisetalk19 comments

This is super cool, and reminds me of when I first learned about <summary><details> tags for some reason.

It also reminds me of this, which sadly loses some charm now that browsers seem to love to hide the full URL:

https://matthewrayfield.com/articles/animating-urls-with-jav...

Author here! That article (and plenty of other stuff on that site) was a direct inspiration for this trick! Matthew's stuff is really great.

Early on I thought I might try to incorporate some kind of browser-bar animation into what I was doing here but I didn't come up with anything concrete before bumping into the browser-compatibility issues that stopped me from going further with this idea.

Cool - though I noticed it completely trashes your history with loads of entries.

It's been a few years since I did frontend, but if I recall correctly, it's possible to avoid trashing the history.

Very impressive and a perfect article for HN.

We need more teeny-tiny projects that illustrate somewhat novel or lesser-known "things you can do". I love it.

Is the color scheme kinda odd for anyone else? Seems like the focus is stuck on the video or something.

Hi! I picked the color scheme pretty haphazardly and have avoided tweaking it because I figure I'll fall into a rabbit hole. Do you just mean that the background seems super muted / desaturated as though it's being faded while you play the video? I could see how it might seem that way (the truth is just that I'm not great at color picking :p).

On mobile the desaturated background / color change doesn’t reset when the video is paused.

𝚂𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴

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𝚁𝙾𝙶𝚄𝙴

𝙶𝚁𝙴𝙰𝚃

𝙶𝚁𝙴𝙴𝚃

WRT monospace (comment below the video), how about like this? Also. Is there a playable version online somewhere?

Ah! That's a great idea re: monospace-ness.

I haven't put a playable version online just because I wasn't super excited at spending much more time on something that is Firefox-only just because that limits the audience a bit. I'm toying with some other unusual vectors for games - I may end up putting this game online when I've got a more complete set of games to share.

If you're really curious it is not too painful to run this locally:

  * add `127.0.0.1 searchgame` to /etc/hosts (or s/searchgame/127.0.0.1 in the wardle repo)
  * clone https://github.com/nolenroyalty/wardle
  * install flask if applicable, then `flask --app app run`
  * visit http://searchgame/ in firefox
  * right-click on the address bar and click "add searchGame"
  * now you can type "searchg<TAB>" to start playing wordle

I don't mention it in the article but the fact that in Firefox you have to right-click on the address bar was another bit of friction that pushed me away from fleshing this idea out .

Is it necessary to right click in the address bar? Like, if I'm on en.wikipedia.org and I right click on the search bar at the top of the page, I get a prompt to add the search with a keyword, which appears to be using the opensearch spec.

Presumably that would make interacting with adding your toy easier - you could tell the user to "right click here" with a little popup. (well, actually I guess you could do that with a little popup pointing at the address bar too - pretty sure websites do that already for encouraging users to do actions outside the browser window for adding a website as a phone app for example)

But, yeah, unfortunate that opensearch isn't very discoverable or cross-browser.. Still, it's just a toy anyway, I assume you weren't planning to turn this into a real service right? :) So who cares if it's Firefox only. It's still a cool toy that would be neat to make real on a random webpage somewhere.

Yeah you're totally right, right clicking a search bar should also work and would be lower friction / less confusing.

> Still, it's just a toy anyway, I assume you weren't planning to turn this into a real service right? :)

Not a real service, but if it was more cross-browser I'd probably have bought a domain for it and spent a week or two trying to build more interesting games with the idea! I think this would have been a fun constraint to build some games around. But sure, this was never going to go far past "fun art project / party trick"

ah. gotcha. Shame about chrome, but yeah, not too shocking that google does not have a ton of incentive to encourage people using anything but google. heck, they've done their best to turn the address bar into a google search.

Still, you don't need to buy a whole domain right? you could just toss the toy somewhere under an existing domain. Use it to highlight google's opposition to certain tech or something...

(oh, also to simplify things even more, your load page could make the input the opensearch was tied to take up the entire page so that people could right click anywhere :) - or style it as an "install" button - "right click to install")

That's also a great suggestion! I'll make sure to credit you if I ever get this cleaned up and properly online :)

Simple, instant, and elegant. I hope search works in the same way. Life would be much easier if I started typing and a bunch of answers appeared immediately. I don't have to visit search results one by one just to find out it's a curation site of stack overflow.

Does this suffer from the classic Wordle edge case bug of not showing green and yellow for a duplicate letter in a wrong and right position?

Looking at the source code, I think there's no such bug. The `to_result` function first colors in green exact matches and counts wrong position letters, then it colors in yellow theses counted letters that are still uncolored. https://github.com/nolenroyalty/wardle/blob/main/app.py#L45

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