A quick history

Old workflow

Pocket + In My Pocket extension

New workflow

Omnivore + … ?

My extension

Omnivore List Popup!

My extension

Omnivore List Popup!

Features:

• Loads and displays Omnivore articles via their API
• Adding new articles
• Basic editing features (archiving, deleting, editing labels)
• Some handy links to the main Omnivore webapp

My extension

Available for Firefox and Chrome

“It’s going to be a simple little web app,
React seems like overkill here.”
Sebastian

Insights and
learnings

• In theory, web extensions are easy to build:
  • HTML, CSS, JS, manifest.json
• Easy local development: Load the folder and use dev tools!
• The web extension standard is generally cool
  • ✅ Chrome (incl. Chromium, Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, …)
  • ✅ Firefox
  • ✅ Safari (in theory)

• Great resources: MDN and Mozilla’s Extension Workshop

• Mozilla’s webextension-polyfill 👍
• Many open-source extensions to learn from

• It’s fun to reach out to the community, and see users and ratings coming in!
• … and they will ask for a Chrome port immediately.

Manifest V2 vs. Manifest V3 makes things complicated:

• V3 is contended and boycotted by many extensions.
• Firefox’s support isn’t complete yet (bug).
• I didn’t manage to migrate my API calls to V3 in Firefox.
• Some build tools help you maintain two sets of manifests, e.g. V2 for Firefox and V3 for Chrome.

Safari support isn’t worth it for me (Apple Developer Program → $99 per year).

People will make you shady offers …