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What Up With the Fraidyc.at 's' Page? Can't I Just View Feeds Locally?

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kickscondor edited this page May 30, 2021 · 6 revisions

The page to view your follows right now is:

https://fraidyc.at/s/

So - it's very unfortunate that I need this page - and I hope it will go away in the future! I would love for everything to be local - but the nature of extensions makes this very difficult.

In fact, when Fraidycat first started, everything was local - and the URL to view feeds was:

chrome-extension://hecfkgekabkkhiidlinmifelhdooeool/index.html

The problem with this approach was that the background page (used to fetch feeds) was using the same thread as the web app (on index.html). When fetching a huge feed (see issue #1) or a series of feeds, the web app would become unresponsive and I would get messages about how Fraidycat's performance sucked! (And it did!)

Unfortunately, extensions are not meant to be web apps - so I don't think putting background page and bundled pages in separate threads is a priority for the makers of Chrome and Firefox.

The fix this, I moved the web app into a 'content script' - the only other type of script that can be included in an extension. This script gets injected into https://fraidyc.at/s/ and performance improved immediately! Content scripts and background scripts don't appear to share a thread.

So - this is the reason for the external URL. A performance reason! 😅

Does This Mean My Follows Get Sent to Fraidyc.at Domain?

No! I keep no server logs for that domain. And only two requests are made by the extension:

  • /s/index.html which is basically a blank page that the extension can inject into. (For the performance reasons above.)
  • /defs/social.json which is the latest definition file for all the social networks. (This way I can fix when a site breaks without you needing to update your extension.)

I'm sure you're like, "Why should I trust you?" Hey, I don't like this either! Just trying to do my best with the limitations I've been given. Feel free to suggest remedies!! (In issue #210.)

In the meantime, you can verify what I'm saying by viewing the Network tab on the extension's background page.

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