Would write a firefox extension for youtube, dunno anything about it yet, where to stard?

Add-ons Development
#1

Hi,

I would like to have a Firefox extension that underlines comments that have been censored on youtube, and I would first know if it looks feasible and if yes, what should I learn for that.

As you may know, censorship of comments on YT is silent: you see your own comments as published, but others cant see them. The only way to see that too is to log-out and come back on the page to see that you cant see them.

What I do, is to open a page in private mode and follow my publications, but of course it’s tedious and slow.

So I thought that maybe an extension could take care of it, opening a private mode navigation page off-display, that would follow my own navigation and compare the content, underlining discrepancies.

I know nothing about FF extension yet (but a bit about coding), and I would just like to know if that seems feasible, if this is the right way to do it, and which doc should I read first to make it.

Thanks for any help.

#2

The first thing you’ll want to do is find out if there is any (hidden) differences between censored and uncensored comments while you are logged in. If there is, you might get away with a user style or script instead of a full WebExtension.
To find that out, you could either do some online research, or you can compare the DOM elements of a known censored and a known uncensored comment element (right click > Inspect Element (Q)).
If there is no difference, you’ll have to load the page without login (cookies) and cross reference.

#3

Clone the repo of this page https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Examples

Open a Firefox tab with about:debugging, load the manifest.json of an extension that is similar to what you want. Start changing it.

#4

how about a tmp container in a new tab instead of a private window? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/