Show HN: Honeybadger Chrome Extension

http://gethoneybadger.com

by jaequery • 12 years ago

27 53 12 years ago

gethoneybadger.com

jaequery10• 12 years ago

I'm sure this extension will serve useful to you as it has done for me and my colleagues. Hope you enjoy it!

drdaeman• 12 years ago

Mind-blown! I can't browse websites without it!

davidw2• 12 years ago

Ok, but what's it doing behind the scenes? I'm not sure I'd trust something that's exchanging data about what I'm browsing with a lot of sites...

jaequery10• 12 years ago

Hi David, well I should make it clear that it does nothing else behind the scenes other than make an HTTP call to get website data only when you hit click to get the data, that's about the only thing it does. I get wary of other extensions too when I install but I can tell you this app does not track sites you browse if that's your concern (you can inspect it yourself and see).

MDCore• 12 years ago

but I can tell you this app does not track sites you browse

Except for this snippet of code in popup.js of course.

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-40692955-5']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Edit: I tested this with a console.log, and it output immediately on page load, without clicking anything.

tzaman• 12 years ago

The orange nearly killed my eyes. Apart from that, why do you use fake testimonials? I'm assuming that, since in the bottom you have a person, called "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard". The lady on the picture is Sarah Parmenter: http://ios-blog.co.uk/featured-posts/sarah-parmenter-web-and...

jaequery10• 12 years ago

Please understand this is a beta release, I've cut many corners left and right to just get it out as it is.

drcoopster2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure that blatant testimonial fabrication and deception is really cutting corners.

acangiano• 12 years ago

You cut a corner you shouldn't have.

quasque2• 12 years ago

Adding fake testimonals really does reflect badly on the trustworthiness of your extension.

hobs• 12 years ago

I think it might just be the pictures that are fake, not the actual testimonials.

rubiquity2• 12 years ago

Were you aware that an exception handling service named Honeybadger already exists?[0]

0 - https://honeybadger.io

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

I actually thought this would integrate somehow to the service. So you're telling me this is completely unrelated to Honeybadger the company?

rubiquity2• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell, yes this is completely unrelated to Honeybadger the company.

hopeless2• 12 years ago

What?! I actually thought this was a little side project by Honeybadger(.io). Poor form.

Added: using the same orange helped the deception.

sudhirj2• 12 years ago

The Technology section is completely off the mark and seems to be choosing servers and partners completely at random. Where are you pulling it from?

jaequery10• 12 years ago

yes its definitely off the mark at the moment, i'll be looking into it.

drcoopster2• 12 years ago

You couldn't come up with a less-lame name? And the "leave feedback" button being a mailing list subscription form?

robmcm• 12 years ago

The fact you have a quote from "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard" with a photo of "Sarah Parmenter, Owner of You Know Who" makes me think you made them up.

I wonder how many testimonials on the web are actually real?

davidw2• 12 years ago

I wonder how many testimonials on the web are actually real?

88.231%, which is a bit higher than the number of made up statistics, coming in at 71.9231%.

outworlder• 12 years ago

That depends. Do you require them to be in their original context and be still current? If not, yes, I have seen some "real" ones.

sudhirj2• 12 years ago

Am I the only one trying to figure out when the intro video was made based on the HN frontpage it shows?

dewey• 12 years ago

May 16, 11:17 PM. Top right corner ;)

wbond• 12 years ago

Interesting little tool, however, the "Built With" section was 100% incorrect/random for the few sites I checked.

ohadron• 12 years ago

For me as well. Seems completely random and false even for things that are extremely easy to detect such as Google Analytics.

king-coconut• 12 years ago

Doesn't really work, shows only a blank white window, no info visible on any of the sites I tried. Does the plugin work through www-proxy?

andyhmltn2• 12 years ago

Nice little app! Just a little honest observation though: Is anything in the tech section actually true?

I just checked my personal site and it came up with technologies I've never heard of. It also said I use 'bitpay' for payments

jaequery10• 12 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out, there is a technical difficulty with the builtwith stats right now, looking into it.

andyhmltn2• 12 years ago

Awesome nice work!

icefox• 12 years ago

So what does it do? The text on the webpage doesn't actually say.

Bassetts• 12 years ago

At the mere click of a button, our honeybadger will let you see how much traffic the site gets, how much money they raised, what powers their stack, and much more.

BaconJuice• 12 years ago

those testimonials seem fake? are they fake?

LukeB_UK• 12 years ago

The site gives me absolutely no information about what this extension actually does. "Juicy informations" could literally be anything.

mtford• 12 years ago

So, HN was built with Stiqr and reddit was built with Website Tonight...?

jaequery10• 12 years ago

Ah, I see what you guys are saying now. I'll have to look it up why its doing this!

raghavb• 12 years ago

The most useful/interesting for me is the technology section. As that's not the easiest to get data about. Unfortunately the info that its giving is completely false/random. Checked it on a few websites that I've built or know the stack and the info shown is completely wrong.

www.builtwith.com provides much more information but they do not have a chrome plugin that I'm aware of. Definitely should check it out if your interested in this plugin.

jaequery10• 12 years ago

Could you give me an example of a site you did? Although I know it's not 100% accurate, from my experience, they were fairly accurate. I am pulling data from builtwith.com btw.

dukekarthik• 12 years ago

builtwith.com shows proper data but the extension shows completely random information.

ryangripp• 12 years ago

Now we just need a Honeybadger Firefox edition

quasque2• 12 years ago

Your whois lookup is broken for ac.uk domains - for example, all of these requests return the whois data for ac.uk itself, rather than the specified domain:

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/ox.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/cam.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/dur.ac.uk

(This list might help to uncover other problems like this: https://publicsuffix.org/)

sullivanmatt• 12 years ago

I will start by saying that the site color scheme is pretty sharp for my eyes. I think you'll have a more polished look by having the background be white with a more neutral color palette.

For the extension itself: I like that it doesn't call out for information unless called upon, but if I ask for information about a site, I see no reason for you to have to collect the full URL and POST it to /track. That could lead to unexpected data leakage (as some URLs could be sensitive). You should probably get those API calls over to using HTTPS as well.

Also with every lookup, my console gets the log message "asdf", which is kind of weird. One thing I noticed is that the extension is pretty slow to get information. It appears it calls out for each item individually, and this leads to seven unique calls to your API that could be condensed into one request / response. If an API call fails with a 500 error, the entire stacktrace is dumped to the user. You'll want to disable debugging mode in your Express app to ensure that doesn't happen.

Since these APIs are public, you might want to consider rate limiting by IP, or you might find that your extension isn't the only consumer of them. A free and open WHOIS or Geolocation API that responds with JSON could be abused by other app developers, and having that already around moves the cost from them to you.

gyardley• 12 years ago

It might be an awesome extension, but if it's not related to the company at honeybadger.io, you need to rename the thing.

Even if the similarity was completely inadvertent, it's just going to lead to confusion and legal hassle, and could end up hurting your reputation more than the functionality of the extension will help it.

dingaling• 12 years ago

A more traditional name for honey badger is the Boer 'ratel'.

It's also catchier - might make a better product name.

lorenzhs• 12 years ago

Injecting Google Analytics into each and every page I visit is not cool, mate... I uninstalled it again.

uptownhr2• 12 years ago

GA is not being injected into pages. it's only tracking the times you click on the extension button.

bichiliad• 12 years ago

So you know, your "Leave Feedback" button seems to lead to a survey / feedback form for "Competition Tab," rather than Honeybadger.

Edit: For what it's worth, if the plugin really does what it says it does on the Chrome Webstore page, it sounds really, really useful. Will try later.

Show HN: Honeybadger Chrome Extension

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