Hacker News: smaddock

New comment by smaddock in "JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals"

smaddock — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:16:44 +0000

They mentioned React is missing timing information in the devtools profiler. This was actually added in React 19.2 which should be helpful for debugging.

https://react.dev/blog/2025/10/01/react-19-2#performance-tra...

WebView2 drops future Linux and Mac support

smaddock — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 15:41:17 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/1314

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40937875

Points: 13

# Comments: 3

New comment by smaddock in "Atlassian Acquires Loom"

smaddock — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 18:22:40 +0000

ShareX uploads videos in a pipeline: record, optimize, then upload.

Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.

New comment by smaddock in "Wine Wayland Driver"

smaddock — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 18:33:30 +0000

Slack tracks close to the latest releases of Electron. Election also tracks close to the latest Chromium releases [0].

[0] https://releases.electronjs.org

New comment by smaddock in "Free, P2P, disposable group video calling app for the web"

smaddock — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 05:33:08 +0000

It gets difficult when you have users saying they can't connect to each other. Then you have to get a better grasp on networking to understand why they can't, sometimes staring at Chrome's webrtc-internals page hoping something clicks. Otherwise you'll have your hands tied and just assume their network is incompatible. Even with a TURN server configured, the same problem can occur.

New comment by smaddock in "Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy"

smaddock — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 19:25:23 +0000

Can you elaborate on which security protections are not used by Electron, and by extension Min?

Fixing the entire Super Mario 64 source code

smaddock — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 04:52:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30974564

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by smaddock in "The WebSocket Handbook"

smaddock — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 16:56:56 +0000

It's probably worth mentioning that WebTransport just shipped in Chrome 97 (2022-01-04), which seems to be a worthy successor to WebSockets [0]. It allows for reliable and unreliable modes which is a problem for games using WebSockets, among other things.

[0] https://web.dev/webtransport/

New comment by smaddock in "A system in which soft robots “evolve” to walk or climb"

smaddock — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 04:37:23 +0000

Their comment is in reference to Hayao Miyazaka's thoughts on a particular AI-based animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

New comment by smaddock in "Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow"

smaddock — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 18:08:11 +0000

I appreciate that yourself and other folks are engaging in the community to request improvements.

Prior to the group being formed, most discussion regarding MV3 occurred on the Chrome Extensions Google Group [0]. While feedback was accepted and open there, I hadn't seen the Chrome team acting on it to make changes. That's where most of my pessimism on the situation comes from.

I believe the Chrome team's main motivation is removing any functionality in MV3 which would have the possibility of reducing performance in normal browsing. I personally don't have much hope that they'll be backpedaling on any changes.

[0] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio...

New comment by smaddock in "Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow"

smaddock — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 17:22:56 +0000

I am an extension developer, but have resigned from engaging with development in the ecosystem. One of my extensions has >300k subscribers on the Chrome Webstore which will be killed by MV3.

Many ongoing changes are being made in extensions and the web in general to improve security while reducing capabilities in existing applications.

At this point, for more complex use cases such as one of my own, the only hope is building your own web browser with complete control over its systems. I've changed focus to improving Electron for this reason.

Ideally, I'd like to see MV3 continue supporting the persistent context use case as well as maintaining webRequest blocking support.

New comment by smaddock in "Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow"

smaddock — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 17:13:49 +0000

Thanks for mentioning this. I've been aware of this group since its announcement, but have been ignorant of the ongoing discussions.

Hopefully Google and others are receptive to some of the proposals made in the issues. I recognize the value of reintroducing the persistent capabilities to the SW model.

New comment by smaddock in "Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow"

smaddock — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 07:57:44 +0000

As someone who is intimately familiar with the Chrome extensions internals and is not employed by a big tech company, I believe most of the changes seem like a step in the right direction.*

I've been working towards implementing greater support for Chrome extensions in Electron which has involved reading and interacting with Chromium code [0].

- Using service workers instead of a hidden background webpage is more idiomatic for web developers.

- Forced non-persistent extensions guides developers to a better implementation which relies on less resources.

*The deprecation of webRequest's blocking behavior is what's most concerning. The implementation in Manifest V2 requires sending a message back and forth between processes with JS processing for each network request which seems to be in part why they redesigned it.

However, that optimization costs so much for innovative ad blocking technologies as gorhill of uBlock Origin has mentioned. When ad blocking begins requiring new methods of detection or filtering, it'll now be up to Chromium maintainers to implement support for it in the new declarativeNetRequest API. This is a tradeoff of performance for reduced flexibility where it is absolutely needed.

[0] https://github.com/samuelmaddock/electron-browser-shell

New comment by smaddock in "Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly"

smaddock — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 19:00:36 +0000

I've been working on adding better support for browser extensions in Electron. It's an absolutely necessary feature for web browsers. Maybe OP can have a look: https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-chrome-extensions

New comment by smaddock in "Stripe Reader"

smaddock — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 06:21:14 +0000

For those not in the know, 4242 is used as a common test card number.

https://stripe.com/docs/testing#cards

New comment by smaddock in "Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster"

smaddock — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 22:27:46 +0000

Wouldn't this completely break accessibility support of such web apps? This is part of the reason why omitting the DOM and rendering a UI with WebGL isn't the best idea. Maybe this could be resolved by sending the accessibility tree to the client, but it seems like a step backwards.

New comment by smaddock in "Permission.site"

smaddock — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 04:12:16 +0000

Desktop and window capture is included for all platforms as part of WebRTC.

New comment by smaddock in "Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?"

smaddock — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 09:14:24 +0000

Tired of walled gardens and increased limitations of Chrome extensions, I'm building enough of the web extensions API to let me run them in my own desktop browser. Eventually I plan to build products from this project.

https://github.com/samuelmaddock/electron-browser-shell

New comment by smaddock in "I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)"

smaddock — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 23:05:52 +0000

Content decryption through the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) web standard.

https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/

New comment by smaddock in "I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)"

smaddock — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 23:03:11 +0000

At the time of the article, Chromium Edge hadn't been released yet with PlayReady CDM integrated. The followup article I wrote elaborates on these options further.

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-br...