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Comment by jlawrence6809 | Hacker News Reader

I built a chrome extension that is featured on the chrome web store[1] and the number of requests I get from shady data brokers looking to buy my extension and fill it with spyware is really concerning. A naive dev could build something cool and sell it off to someone thinking they'll maintain if for them but instead just cause a hazard for users. Google seems to do a decent job of reviewing the use of permissions but some extensions like mine really need access to everything on the page so I can only imagine what a data broker could do with it. Be careful what you install.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/css-selector-helper...

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Cool extension. I love when devs open source stuff that makes their lives easier.

Thanks! Here is the repo if you have any issues/suggestions: https://github.com/jlawrence6809/CSS-Selector-Helper-for-Chr...

How far did you have to deviate from the demo extension to make this? I've written themes for vscode and intellij but never done an actual extension because it's js/ts and I don't really enjoy writing those.

I really wish they had a DSL for extensions to allow them to be more broadly written. Like, I feel like I have to basically learn js to learn to write a chrome extension and I'm a go/rust dev who will use it literally nowhere and I just want to make the AWS console not suck, for instance.

But I keep trying to will someone like me into existence to make this extension and nobody is appearing lmao.

This extension is pretty unlike most of the examples the chrome docs provide because it extends the devtools which most extensions don't do. There are a lot of hidden gotchas you have to look out for when extending devtools and the api they provide just isn't as well thought out. However I actually made the first version of this extension when I was just starting out learning html/css/js and I think it was good project for that. I wouldn't worry about making something presentable for the webstore at first. Just build whatever you need with really bare bones UI and iterate if you forsee it being useful for other people. Maybe even start with a greasemonkey script.

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