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

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 #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 the separation between background page and bundled pages is a priority.

So, instead, I moved the web app into a 'content script' that gets injected into https://fraidyc.at/s/ and performance improved. Content scripts and background scripts don't appear to share a thread.

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