Brotherzed comments on The Web Browser is Not Your Client (But You Don't Need To Know That) - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Error 22 April 2016 12:12AM

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Comment author: Brotherzed 10 May 2016 08:52:37PM *  0 points [-]

I admit I didn't think it all the way through. If your goal isn't ultimately data collection, you would make a browser addon and use javascript injection (the frontend scripting language for rendering web pages). I replied to another person with loose technical details, but you could create a browser addon where you push a button in the top right corner of your browser, type a username, and then it transforms the page to show nothing but posts by the user of that page by leveraging the web page's frontend scripting language.

So there's a user-friendly way to transform your browser's rendering without APIs, clunky web scrapers or excess server load. It's basically the same principle that adblockers work on.