Feature 2 is really useful. When I land on a technical article I know chances are there will be a nice HN discussion, that may sometimes even refute the main point of the article.
Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge (https://github.com/forge-ext/forge) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.
> Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level
Not only does it "prefer", they actually enforce this. I haven't found any sensible way of completely disabling tabs in either Firefox or Chromium. FF has some janky extension that kinda sorta works, but it's a hideous workaround consisting of hiding the tab bar and automatically detaching most new tabs. With the rest of the tabs, you're SOL. Haven't found anything at all for chrome.
I very much prefer managing windows with my my... window manager. Which works the same way with all applications.
I think there are, see the other comment about tree-style tabs or similar for Firefox. I can absolutely see the value in that and I don't argue for that option to be removed or otherwise degraded.
But that's not the point. I'm not against applications offering those possibilities, and when I have to use Windows for work, I'm happy browsers have them.
My point is that they shouldn't force users into this way of working. Browsers already support multiple windows. Why can't I just disable the whole tab feature if I don't care for it? A while ago, when tabs were still new, you had to actively opt in. The default was a new window for everything. Now this option is completely gone for some reason.
I got used to opening a new tab for things to read before RSS first invented. So I guess it became a 2nd nature. I also think it is better to read the article first before going to the comments session. So Feature 1 isn't that useful.
For feature 2 it is great. Although thinking about it I kind wish this could be done without browser extension but an actual site feature by HN.
Not sure if I agree about using windows instead of tabs. I have hundreds of tabs open, and dozens loaded, at any moment. I'm sure that it's possible to manage all the context with separate windows via a window manager, but it would have to be a REALLY good window manager to be able to provide equivalent features of tree style tabs and separate panes and whatever else that something like Sidebery provides, and it is always easier for each application developer to implement tabs suitable for that application's requirements.
I think one of the point of the author is making might also be that a window manager could do just more, like managing windows as tabs as well.
So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.
I think I agree with that. I could imaging that the browser containers of tabs would make a ton of sense if I could make a container of windows handled as tabs across different applications at the window manager level.
Ideally the manager would have windows and containers. Containers can be nested and can be floating windows, splits and tabs. There is no reason why tabs inside a window should belong to one application.
All that being said, navigation in such a structure would be a mess that would need a lot of learning. Also I’m sure a window manager like this already exists somewhere.
A system wide search within tabs would help more maybe.
> So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.
Not only that, but you could actually mix "tabs" from separate applications!
Windows (IE) tried to give WM visibility into tabs long ago, but this quickly revealed a problem: if tabs are now also separate windows, they enter the Alt+Tab ring, and suddenly you're Alt+Tabbing between 5 applications and dozens of open tabs. N=1, as a tab hoader, I absolutely hated it (it also made Alt+Tab itself very slow to show and cycle).
The general problem is that having WM handle in-app tabs means the WM has to support every single hare-brained idea about meaning and role of tabs that app developers invent, which is infeasible. Even with browsers - until recently, you had like just two types of tabs: regular tabs, and porn-mode (er, "private browsing") tabs. Then came "account containers" or whatever it was in Firefox. Then came tab groups, reading groups, and tons of other nonsense.
OTOH, I can dream of an ideal world where the OS manages all tabs for all apps via combination of Sidebery (better "tree style tabs") and a tiling WM.
Do you really need hundreds of open tabs though? To me this suggests a workflow issue rather than a tab management problem.
I only keep tabs open that I'm actively working on right now (or am imminently about to switch back to). I regularly close tabs (and windows for that matter) that are only open because I forgot about them, or that I might use again but not until hours or days later. If I need them later I just open them again.
For me, having hundreds of things open at once just creates clutter that makes it harder to focus.
Using Sidebery panes and treestyle tabs makes it really easy to organize your tabs, I have a tree with all my tasks with relevant documentation or subtasks under each task, and I have a separate panes with all the documentation I refer constantly at the top and everything I'm reading right now at the bottom. I definitely have a lot of tabs I opened to read and never closed, but that doesn't matter since everything is arranged in an approximation of a 2D space, I still know where to look for something specific. I'm sure you feel this is weird because you've never used a tree-style tab manager, but personally I can't go back to a regular browsing setup.
I think I'd still maintain a conceptual difference between sites that are source material (e.g. documentation) or apps (e.g. Google Translate), and those that are just for browsing (e.g. news, blogs) and are more ephemeral (I may read it now, or keep it for later, but either way I'll be done with it).
You'd open a PDF, Word document, or app in its own window which you'd manage with your DE / WM. To me it feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to have some of this type of content handled by my WM, and others by a tree-style tab manager, when they are the same "type" of content. I want to be able to press the same keyboard shortcut to switch to my documentation whether it happens to be a PDF or a website.
On the other hand, there isn't anything else really equivalent to browsing-type content, so the tree-style tab manger feels more natural to me there.
I use Sway and happily manage my terminal windows using its tabs and splits. I can mix other "graphical" apps with the terminals or move them to another screen, all with the same keybindings. I agree, though, that I wouldn't want to replace my Sidebery vertical tabs with this setup, but I ultimately don't see why equivalent functionality couldn't be implemented inside the window manager in some alternate universe.
There are sadly hardly any WMs now with tabs, so having them support tree style tabs as well doesn't look too realistic.
1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey.
2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.
is this better than using a chrome extension? i guess people need to have tampermonkey installed and so thats a slightly higher barrier to entry? i wonder if chrome would be interested in "sherlocking" userscripts so that we can distribute non security nightmare code easier.
In addition to the advantage of explicitly specified capabilities mentioned by others, I'd say a userscript is also much more durable and low-maintenance than a Chrome extension. This is coming from someone who's written an extension for personal use before, and had to jump through a million hoops with Chrome Dev just to give the browser permission to run my own code that I wrote myself, and that's to say nothing of the whole mess with manifest v3 as well. Throughout the entire time I've been able to happily keep using userscripts written by myself or others with 0 maintenance required.
for me on chrome (stable), all that’s needed to install my own extensions is enable Developer Mode in chrome://extensions, then load an unpacked folder as an extension
Mostly transparency. Since this runs across pages you visit (with the sites controlled by the @include/@exclude rules at the top of the script), I like that the entire source is right there and easy to inspect before installing it.
A userscript also let me iterate quickly without dealing with extension packaging and permissions, but being able to see and tweak the code was a big part of the appeal.
Tampermonkey isn't better than using a Chrome extension, but it's less friction for a developer to build and distribute a cross browser script. If they build it as an extension, they need to target multiple browsers and get it deployed to the Firefox/Chrome web store.
If you can read JS and the user script is not huge, I think it makes a huge difference.
Apart from that, there are APIs exclusive to extensions, e.g. instrumenting client-side communication among tabs with different origins, listing all tabs, basically accessing a special API that sits on a higher-level context, and, while gating certain functionality behind user approval, and forbidding other functionality completely (at least in Manifest 3.0), extensions with the corresponding permissions can do more than a script running in the page context. They can inject these as well, though, even overriding CSP sometimes, as far as I know?
The main problem with these permissions, and WebExtension 3.0 partly was an attempt to improve this, or at least claims it: most people give a second of doubt at best when installing an extension, as long as they think it comes from a trusted source.
I'd improve it by counting top level comments next to items but that would slow it down. Still need to make some slight changes like closing sidebar by re-clicking orange (beyond just right-clicking sidebar.)
Firefox has a new Split View that's useful for this, but you still have to left click and select open in split view (M) then click the link. You also used to be able on some browsers to craft a link that was href="tab1.html|tab2.html", no idea if that's still a thing or if it was limited to "home page" setting.
In Chrome, I just right-clicked the link above and hit "open in split view" and it did.
It was 50/50, with HN on the left, so maybe it's not as easy to read the post in smaller windows. Otherwise, seems to provide the same service, essentially.
Vivaldi has included split view for years (called tiles). You can also right click a link and choose open in follower tab. This lets all links clicked in one tile open in another tile. I use this regularly on HN.
If you use Firefox (and will pardon me plugging my own project), you might be interested in a version of this I made a while ago as a browser extension:
My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.
Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!
I like the bloom filter idea - I agree I don't want every URL I visit to be sent to Algolia. I really like this project's UI though - automatically opening it in a pane so I don't have to leave the site to see comments is really nice.
Not the author, but this prevents leaking all URLs you are visiting to agolia. Instead of asking Was this URL submitted to Hacker News? you ask Which URLs have been submitted to Hecker News?, store that in a Bloom filter, and then use the Bloom filter to answer the question Was this URL [likely] submitted to Hacker News?
This. I gather interesting posts this way in my browser tabs in the phone and everytime I finish reading something I click "Back" and there's usually a discussion there, unless I opened the link originally from somewhere else than HN.
Have you considered modifying it to trigger on every HNews click as well as with as manually triggered? As it is now it leaks browser URLs + query string + fragments to hn.algolia.com since it queries it on every single page you visit. At the very least it might be good to sanitize the queries by restricting to origin + path?
I’d love if there were different “layers” of meta discussion on top of everything on the web. Every blog and website would have an untold number of communities having discussions that are completely optional for you to view.
Instead of browsing across sites, you’d be browsing across communities seeing the same site.
Fun story. Way back in 2008, I tried to make it exactly that. I worked on figuring a way to inject the reddit comments onto any page. Sadly at the time the JS ecosystem just wasn't mature enough to allow users to log into reddit and safely inject it onto the page.
Disqus existed, but it worked because every page was completely independent. The discussion only existed embedded on the page.
Open to it. For now I’m going to keep it as a userscript and build out some of the interesting ideas people have suggested here. If it keeps growing, a proper extension would definitely make sense.
Or, open the comments and then click the title link. Then click back when you’re done reading the article, so you can read the comments. That’s my preferred mobile workflow anyways.
Wouldn't it make sense to have it an extension? Just spontainously (without reading any instructions) I don't understand how to use this or what Userscripts
Tamper or Violentmonkey is.
I prefer user scripts as I have to install one extension that can load many plugins (user scripts) instead of having one extension for every tiny website tweak.
Also much easier to glance over what a user script is doing vs. unpacking some extension and then finding the actual business logic in all the wrapper code.
It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?
Can the links be opened in pairs using the split view feature? like create a split view, open the article on the left hand side and the comments on the right hand side.
The mobile default seems important here: opening the panel collapsed, then preserving its size per site, could keep the first article read predictable while retaining quick access to the discussion.
I've updated to v1.4.5 which now allows you to drag the toggle button anywhere you want on screen, and added the collapsed-by-default behavior on mobile.
That said, in case it helps anyone else, my usual flow is to middle-click (by clicking my mouse wheel) both the link and the comments link which opens each in a new background tab (at least in Chrome). Hopefully that's lower-friction than what you were doing with the two tabs.
I made something slightly similar ~10 years ago where you could embed HN comments in your own site. It was the opposite end of consumer though, for webdevs to embed it.
Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality if people used it as normal comments, but yours is great since it's the opposite target/usage
Is it lame that (especially for super long discussions), I often open a gemini tab and summarize the comments? I like reading HN comment threads, but I often only have a few minutes and just want to get the gist of the reactions from the community for some topic.
The submission is cool because it opens the comments even if you just happen upon some article that also happens to have a HN discussion. That said, when I read the headline I thought the same thing, “uh, right click, open in split view?” When that feature landed in Chrome my first use case was exactly this.
I normalize the URL and use HN's Algolia search API to find an existing story with a matching URL. I don't currently handle multiple HN submissions of the same article; I just use the matching story I find.
That being said, I could see creating a historical snapshot of all the times an article has been submitted and building a blended comments section in the future.
I used another approach - created a custom RSS that has both links, plus the content of the top comment in the same item. There are also a few other filters like selecting only posts that have at least 50 points. Github actions handles RSS updates every five hours, making feed generation completely free.
I've made ChatGPT Atlas as my AI-only browser. Whenever there's an HN post about something interesting but not THAT interesting to manually sift through 100+ comments on it, I just ask it to summarize it for me :')
Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge (https://github.com/forge-ext/forge) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.
Not only does it "prefer", they actually enforce this. I haven't found any sensible way of completely disabling tabs in either Firefox or Chromium. FF has some janky extension that kinda sorta works, but it's a hideous workaround consisting of hiding the tab bar and automatically detaching most new tabs. With the rest of the tabs, you're SOL. Haven't found anything at all for chrome.
I very much prefer managing windows with my my... window manager. Which works the same way with all applications.
But that's not the point. I'm not against applications offering those possibilities, and when I have to use Windows for work, I'm happy browsers have them.
My point is that they shouldn't force users into this way of working. Browsers already support multiple windows. Why can't I just disable the whole tab feature if I don't care for it? A while ago, when tabs were still new, you had to actively opt in. The default was a new window for everything. Now this option is completely gone for some reason.
I got used to opening a new tab for things to read before RSS first invented. So I guess it became a 2nd nature. I also think it is better to read the article first before going to the comments session. So Feature 1 isn't that useful.
For feature 2 it is great. Although thinking about it I kind wish this could be done without browser extension but an actual site feature by HN.
So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.
I think I agree with that. I could imaging that the browser containers of tabs would make a ton of sense if I could make a container of windows handled as tabs across different applications at the window manager level.
All that being said, navigation in such a structure would be a mess that would need a lot of learning. Also I’m sure a window manager like this already exists somewhere.
A system wide search within tabs would help more maybe.
Like chrome’s cmd+A but for all tabs everywhere
Not only that, but you could actually mix "tabs" from separate applications!
The general problem is that having WM handle in-app tabs means the WM has to support every single hare-brained idea about meaning and role of tabs that app developers invent, which is infeasible. Even with browsers - until recently, you had like just two types of tabs: regular tabs, and porn-mode (er, "private browsing") tabs. Then came "account containers" or whatever it was in Firefox. Then came tab groups, reading groups, and tons of other nonsense.
OTOH, I can dream of an ideal world where the OS manages all tabs for all apps via combination of Sidebery (better "tree style tabs") and a tiling WM.
I only keep tabs open that I'm actively working on right now (or am imminently about to switch back to). I regularly close tabs (and windows for that matter) that are only open because I forgot about them, or that I might use again but not until hours or days later. If I need them later I just open them again.
For me, having hundreds of things open at once just creates clutter that makes it harder to focus.
Using Sidebery panes and treestyle tabs makes it really easy to organize your tabs, I have a tree with all my tasks with relevant documentation or subtasks under each task, and I have a separate panes with all the documentation I refer constantly at the top and everything I'm reading right now at the bottom. I definitely have a lot of tabs I opened to read and never closed, but that doesn't matter since everything is arranged in an approximation of a 2D space, I still know where to look for something specific. I'm sure you feel this is weird because you've never used a tree-style tab manager, but personally I can't go back to a regular browsing setup.
I think I'd still maintain a conceptual difference between sites that are source material (e.g. documentation) or apps (e.g. Google Translate), and those that are just for browsing (e.g. news, blogs) and are more ephemeral (I may read it now, or keep it for later, but either way I'll be done with it).
You'd open a PDF, Word document, or app in its own window which you'd manage with your DE / WM. To me it feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to have some of this type of content handled by my WM, and others by a tree-style tab manager, when they are the same "type" of content. I want to be able to press the same keyboard shortcut to switch to my documentation whether it happens to be a PDF or a website.
On the other hand, there isn't anything else really equivalent to browsing-type content, so the tree-style tab manger feels more natural to me there.
There are sadly hardly any WMs now with tabs, so having them support tree style tabs as well doesn't look too realistic.
1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey. 2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.
A userscript also let me iterate quickly without dealing with extension packaging and permissions, but being able to see and tweak the code was a big part of the appeal.
Apart from that, there are APIs exclusive to extensions, e.g. instrumenting client-side communication among tabs with different origins, listing all tabs, basically accessing a special API that sits on a higher-level context, and, while gating certain functionality behind user approval, and forbidding other functionality completely (at least in Manifest 3.0), extensions with the corresponding permissions can do more than a script running in the page context. They can inject these as well, though, even overriding CSP sometimes, as far as I know?
The main problem with these permissions, and WebExtension 3.0 partly was an attempt to improve this, or at least claims it: most people give a second of doubt at best when installing an extension, as long as they think it comes from a trusted source.
thought I realize "if it works it works", https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey
https://greasyfork.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/sokzpb2ztmatlh... (screenshot)
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588721-hacker-news-comment...
I'd improve it by counting top level comments next to items but that would slow it down. Still need to make some slight changes like closing sidebar by re-clicking orange (beyond just right-clicking sidebar.)
It's very fast and speeds up thinking overall.
I would say only go for extensions over userscript if you need a settings menu (or any of the APIs the sibling comment mentions).
It was 50/50, with HN on the left, so maybe it's not as easy to read the post in smaller windows. Otherwise, seems to provide the same service, essentially.
Edge had the open links in the other split, chrome doesn't
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox
I generally open the HN comment link, then click the article link, read it, then click back to read the comments.
I'll see if this split view feature works better for me though, but I think I'd prefer a horizontal split instead of vertical.
If any of those vim extensions support link+split, and allow interaction with splits that would be even better.
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button
My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.
Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!
https://github.com/twalichiewicz/HNewhere/issues/2
Instead of browsing across sites, you’d be browsing across communities seeing the same site.
Disqus existed, but it worked because every page was completely independent. The discussion only existed embedded on the page.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
Would you be interested in making one?
My use case, even on phone:
View HN
Right click link to open in new tab OR: tap/hold a link then open I a new window.
What problem is this solving?
Also much easier to glance over what a user script is doing vs. unpacking some extension and then finding the actual business logic in all the wrapper code.
It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?
I've updated to v1.4.5 which now allows you to drag the toggle button anywhere you want on screen, and added the collapsed-by-default behavior on mobile.
In the excludes, did you mean *.bank.com, or *bank.com?
Or maybe even *bank*.*!
That said, in case it helps anyone else, my usual flow is to middle-click (by clicking my mouse wheel) both the link and the comments link which opens each in a new background tab (at least in Chrome). Hopefully that's lower-friction than what you were doing with the two tabs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366
Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality if people used it as normal comments, but yours is great since it's the opposite target/usage
The uploads to greasy fork seem reduced these days.
I normalize the URL and use HN's Algolia search API to find an existing story with a matching URL. I don't currently handle multiple HN submissions of the same article; I just use the matching story I find.
That being said, I could see creating a historical snapshot of all the times an article has been submitted and building a blended comments section in the future.
https://github.com/twalichiewicz/HNewhere/releases/tag/v1.4....
You can test with https://www.apple.com/iphone/
This shouldn't be a script (no offense, great job!). It should be built into the browsers!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
https://github.com/rzagreb/hackernews-top-rss
This is actually how I found this article as well
currently rocking 666 users... https://oj-hn.com
I'm working on a fix, but in the meantime you can add `@exclude https://chatgpt.com/*` to the userscript header.
EDIT: Added this to the v1.4.0 release just now.
classic beginner error, in fact no one is supposed to click on TFA
1. open the comments page
2. select the comment box
3. judge the linked content by its HN title alone and get ready to post
/s