There's some overhead, but not much. It basically just parses the underlying HTML as soon as it's loaded, then redraws it with added features.

Also no heavy frameworks used, just basic hand-coded JS + jquery + a few helper libraries (luxon for dates etc)

The post was about efficiency for the user, not for the computer.

Yeah I missed that, first thought was efficient performance!

I agree, it's a lot harder to logically/visually move through comments. The grey-black-black-with-underlines is a lot easier to read then the bold-black/black/thin-hl. It's kind of why I hate the new reddit style too.

I also don't like having to hover to see the icons for reply. Why are you hiding the parent/context buttons for navigation in a dot-dot-dot menu when you drill into a comment chain? Where's prev/next? Upvote/Downvote/hover UI covers stuff, and no alt tags anywhere to be seen.

Also why does it need perms to firebase and extensionpay again?

It just feels clunky even as a redesign.

I think there’s a trend to replace applications having information-dense designs with all actions at your fingertips with ones that add so much padding that you can only see a little bit of information at a time and in order to perform any action, you have to hover or click several times.

yes, and i find it disturbing. either a feature is there, then it should be visible at all times, or it should be off completely. while i am reading my eyes are tracking the locations of those buttons/links so that i can quickly move the mouse to use them. if they are hidden that slows me down and gets in the way. it makes sense on small screen like mobile where it is better to use the space to show more content and have actions hidden behind a menu, but not on the desktop.

https://hackrnews-dj.netlify.app Have you tried to use this HN clone? It is a SPA, but it has very similar UI to the original site, and it has some extra features added (dark an modern UI, bookmarking with highliting new comments, searching through comments, navigating, root comment collapsing in any child comment, and a few other). It is also optimized for desktop and mobile reading, and very readable.

- Good point, I'll add a setting in the next update to always show icons.

- Parent / context are in the menu just to keep the design clean. But I understand that's not what everyone wants, so I will add a setting to show these with the other icons, instead of in the menu.

- Prev / next are moved to the "control pad" (pro feature), but my intention is for the free version to support all current HN features, so I will add those back in the next update.

- The permission to firebase is to access the HN API [1] to grab user profile info etc. The other is for the pro upgrade using ExtPay [2]

[1] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[2] https://github.com/glench/ExtPay

For right now I'm back to using the Hacker News enhancement suite, it builds on top of the compact ui.

could you link to that please?

Why is it way less efficient?

because it hides important UI elements. in particular prev and next which i use frequently are completely missing. that alone forced me to turn off the extension after just a few minutes, because unfortunately it made pages very difficult to navigate.

Good point, I'll add prev / next back in the next update. They've been moved to the "control pad" (pro feature) in the extension, but my intention is for the free version to support all current HN features.

It's not of course

I'd day there is a balance between form and function when it comes to websites, and I'd rather stare at a nice looking slightly less efficient webpage rather than an ugly but more efficient one.