[FR] Font smoothing, develop a chrome extension

[evnchn]

IMPORTANT: Do not merge. Will break everything.

Please manually inspect extmai-creator.py and userscript.js to see if it is possible to:

• Creare a chrome extension
• Integrate font smoothing
• Or both

[myjian]

The description about this pull request deserves more context about a) what problem you're trying to solve, b) how your code will solve it, and c) how to test it.

There is no need to conflate font smoothing and browser extension. They are 2 different things. If you care about font smoothing very much, please make a separate pull request. Below I'll focus on the extension part.

About creating browser extension, I did not do it for 2 reasons

1. Chrome extension is not supported on mobile, so usage will be limited and can be supported by bookmarklet.
2. The human effort needed to publish new version whenever the code changes is non-trivial / annoying.

So I would prefer not to create a browser extension unless the publishing process is low or no effort. I did look into articles about creating a Github Action to upload to Chrome Web Store but I have not gotten enough motivation to actually try it out.

[evnchn]

I agree with your points about font smoothing. Actually I have done more testing and, preliminarily, bad font rendering only occurs on low-DPI screens, so the users impacted is not a lot.

For the extension: That night, I am trying to explore the possibility to developing extensions, but now I see that you have also explored this idea as well.

For point 1, it is valid. However, on the mobile side, users can still use Firefox extensions. Though, then again, they can use a userscript manager (which has concerns below).

For point 2, it depends.

• For the old manifest V2 standard, no change to the code is needed. The extensions essentially runs the bookmarklet automatically.
  • Anyone, including me, can publish a manifest V2 extension of mai-tools with ease. However, it would not work after browsers drop support for V2.
• For the new manifest V3 standard, change is needed because external script loading is no longer allowed. Having an extension that simply runs the bookmarklet, which loads in other scripts, is no longer possible.
  • If we want to write a V3 extension, we would need to modify the behaviour of mai-tools to stop loading of external scripts. I think it could be possible to just include all the compiled JS in the extension, but as I see the release is quite frequent, it is true that human effort needed to publish new version whenever the code changes is non-trivial / annoying.

I think, in the near future, I will publish the V2 extension to the chrome web store to get a feel of what its like to manage a chrome extension. If you want to do it instead, please tell me.

There are potential issues with trying to run a userscript manager in a V3-only landscape, therefore it is still more secure if a V3-compliant extension is developed before support is dropped for V2. I think I can do so by listening to changes in the GitHub Deployments, downloading the JS by a script, and upload that way, but I think we can agree that GitHub Actions > Human Actions, so I may try to do GitHub Actions integration as well.

You have every right to close this pull request if the extension creator code and font smoothing code doesn't seem useful to you. I'll try my best to work on the stated goals meanwhile in my own fork.

[evnchn]

Closing this PR to clear up space and as userscripts are likely staying for just a while longer. Chrome is likely not winning this round. At least not now.

Progress on developing V3-compliant chrome extensions has not started, because of a lack of time.