Show HN: I Added a Feature to WhatsApp-Web, Animated GIFs Uploads (Chrome Ext.)

Hi HN! I'm Ivan, the creator of this extension and with it you can now right-click any gif on Google Chrome (desktop) to share it with any of your contacts on WhatsApp Web, you can also use it to upload animated GIFs from your computer, you can even drag-and-drop MP4 files to it and they will be treated as gifs (e.g. they will loop, muted of course). A nice feature coming soon its that it will let you share non-gif images using same context menu option.

To create it I had to do a bit of reverse-engineering of the existing JavaScript found at https://web.whatsapp.com/, which is actually a minified React app, I found out that it uses WebSockets to communicate with the backend but thankfully to create this extension I was able to avoid fiddling with those messages. Under the hood it uses the amazing library ffmpeg.wasm (the JS port of ffmpeg): https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm I also made use of TypeScript, React and Vite to create this extension, using this boilerplate as starting point: https://github.com/Jonghakseo/chrome-extension-boilerplate-r...

Feel free to ask any questions or any feedback you may have about it.