Ask HN: Should I resurrect my Chrome extension? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I resurrect my Chrome extension?

I created a moderately successful Chrome extension called Deeper History. Basically it captured the text on pages you visited, stripped all the meta-data, and stored the condensed contents in IndexedDB.

You could then search your history from the navigation bar. Not just the URL and title of the pages visited, but the contents.

I removed it from the webstore b/c found it was storing people's private info like bank account balances. I did build encryption into it but never released that more secure version. Your thoughts.

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Chrome used to have this feature. History was full text searchable. I used to find old articles based only on some phrase or a few key details I remembered.

I didn't use it often, but it was handy when I needed it. Then one day I went looking and it was gone.

maybe you could change it to opt-in per domain? Or opt-out for domains accessed via http and opt-in for ones accessed via https.

> maybe you could change it to opt-in per domain? Or opt-out for domains accessed via http and opt-in for ones accessed via https.

I'd say I visit a couple hundred pages a day. On many different domains. The point of the extension is to index what I visit to make it easy to search - it's only useful if it indexes the majority of the content I visit. Having to opt-in per domain could quickly become tiring.

Opt-out for domains accessed via HTTP and opt-in for ones accessed via HTTPS sounds fine in principle but I'd imagine it could quickly become confusing, especially for users who aren't really family with HTTP(S). And as more and more websites switch to HTTPS, you would find yourself having to manually opt-in more and more, and you'd have the same problem as opt-in per domain.

I'm not normally a big fan of opt-out, but I think that if the point of the extension is to index pages you visit, and to be useful it has to index the majority of the content, it might make sense to make it opt-out.

You could include a list of default domains that are opted-out when the extension is installed, like bank websites and stuff. If it's open source you could invite users to submit pull requests with more domains that should be opted-out of by default.

Good points. Like I said above, I had added an "off" button to temporarily opt-out of pages. I found that in practice, expecting people to remember to do that was problematic. that's how I landed at encryption.

I used encrypt.js for encryption. I had trouble loading the key form a file and ended up having to hard code a key, which of course defeated the purpose of encrypting everything.

That was where I stopped.

It did have an "off" browser action button. I toyed with the idea that once you turn it off for a site, it remembers that choice and will no longer index those sites.

You could add an option to manually "track" a website instead of always saving content.

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