I've released a browser extension^{1Desktop-only, for now.}.

Links: Chrome | Firefox | GitHub

It works as a bridge to HN, letting you upvote, favorite, hide, flag, and reply using your logged-in HN account, all without leaving hcker.news.

Features:

• Do HN actions on hcker.news
• See your HN username and karma in the top-right corner of hcker.news
• From an HN thread, click the extension icon to open the corresponding page on hcker.news

To be clear, this extension performs actions on behalf of whichever account is logged into news.ycombinator.com. If you're in incognito mode or in a Firefox Multi-Account Container, it'll use the account logged into that specific context^{2In order to work with incognito and Firefox Multi-Account Containers, the extension opens a temporary HN tab in the background to execute the action.}.

I'm paranoid about browser extensions, as most of you probably are. I've made the extension minimally permissive, meaning that it only needs access to hcker.news and news.ycombinator.com. When you perform an action, it'll store a record of that in local storage so that the site can show you buttons to undo those actions. Nothing from the extension is sent to hcker.news. The source code is available for review on GitHub. The readme explains the use of permissions in more depth.

As always, feedback welcome at [email protected].

---

1. Desktop-only, for now. ↩

2. In order to work with incognito and Firefox Multi-Account Containers, the extension opens a temporary HN tab in the background to execute the action. ↩