
Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab - dwc
https://github.com/awalGarg/netmonitor
======
qntmfred
nice idea. I would prefer if it reset to 0 on page load though. I used it for
a few minutes and after a few pages the count was already in the hundreds, at
which point I've lost my sense of whether the count was increasing for this
current page or if it was already high from previous pages

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yoasif_
FWIW, this works fine in Firefox as well -- I used
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-
store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-
foxified/) for the first time today, and it works great on the extension
published on the Chrome store.

~~~
r00fus
Must've missed where I could use Chrome extensions on FF - thanks!

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Usu
This looks really interesting, is there a reason why it hasn't been uploaded
to the Chrome Store? It would be much easier to install and keep updated.

~~~
awalGarg
Author here.

I think it involves some payment (IIRC) or some other stupid barrier. If
someone is kind enough to take care of that for me, I'd be happy to publish
it. I have a couple other extensions which I'd like to publish as well but
wasn't able to do so in the past, so I have just stopped trying.

~~~
Usu
I didn't know that, thank you for clarifying, I would be glad to pay for the
fee for you, you may contact me using my twitter username @gmail.com

~~~
awalGarg
No worries! Thank you for offering to pay the fee! Randall has humbly taken
care of it this time though :) (Thanks RKoutnik!)

~~~
chris_wot
Whoa - when I browsed to the GitHub project I was expecting to see something I
needed to compile, but this is all in JavaScript!

Which shows how little I know about Chrome extension writing. Where did you
learn how to write extensions Awal?

Oh, and let me express my appreciation for you taking the time to write this
and put it on GitHub :-)

~~~
awalGarg
Didn't "learn" it - I just google my way through! :P The docs are pretty good
in general. But I guess knowing JS well is important, which I think I do. It
is an easy language (leave for the ecosystem...) so you can surely get started
quickly :)

I am glad you find my work useful, thank you!

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zappo2938
For curiosity I turned off the ad blocker and head over to the Huffington
Post. Every mouse click triggers an XHR event and there is constant
communication on top of that. It reached over 1000 requests after 3 quick page
views.

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baby
Something nice would be to see, next to the tab title, the CPU resource taken
by that tab. I don't mind pages loading a lot of resources, I mind pages
killing my CPU.

~~~
cocotino
You can use Shift+Escape for that

~~~
mcescalante
Shift + Esc doesn't seem work for me (Chrome 53 dev), and there are a few open
bugs about the shortcut not working. Opening Task Manager from the menus works
fine though :)

~~~
mschuster91
Yeah I often fail to open the TM in Chrome/OSX.

This should be trivial to catch with CI tests...wonder what went wrong there.

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basemntunivrse
I really like this, it's an excellent idea.

This might be quite useful for developers as well, just as a quick indicator
instead of having the Developer Tools Network tab open all the time.

One thing that might be quite useful (though it would probably be beyond the
scope of this project and perhaps hard to implement) would be the ability to
block any further requests made by the tab. A sort of per-tab 'offline mode'.
Perhaps as a context menu option when clicking on the icon.

Also, it would be very interesting to see statistics on which popular websites
tend to do the most user-activity tracking, lazy loading etc. - but, in order
to collect and collate these statistics your extension would itself have to
send background requests to some central API. That'd be quite ironic...

Anyway, nice work!

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agumonkey
How hard is it to hook into tab icon / label ? I'd love to see it blink when
something is moving. Reminds me of the audio icon when audio is sent.

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aleem
A few chrome extensions no Chrome should be without. uBlock and/or Ghostery,
needs no introduction.

FlashControl disables flash and allows selective enabling on components, pages
or domains. Quick Javascript Switcher let's you selectively disable JS on
individual pages, handy sometimes for badly behaving pages. Tab Suspender
suspends unused tabs, useful if you have dozens of open tabs not otherwise.

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EugeneOZ
> A lot of web pages use background network requests for tracking user actions
> and sending data to remote servers, lazily loading heavy assets etc., and
> all that goes unnoticed by the user.

And there is nothing wrong with it.

~~~
bhauer
There's also nothing wrong with wanting to know about it. So I applaud the
creation of this extension.

Though he does go on to say:

> _Ideally, the browsers "loading icon" should spin for those requests as
> well_

On that point, I don't agree, since it would give the misleading appearance—at
least to me—that the page wasn't even done with its initial rendering. But
perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort of
unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering. That I would
like.

~~~
awalGarg
Author here.

> perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort
> of unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering

yes, that was what I implied, which is why I wrapped "\"loading icon\"" in
quotes :) I agree though that the wording isn't very clear, my bad!

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p1mrx
My IPvFoo extension has a similar ability:

[https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo](https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo)

When viewing the popup window, each domain gets a yellow highlight if a
connection is currently open. The feature was introduced in 2012:

[https://github.com/pmarks-
net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1...](https://github.com/pmarks-
net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1b6cc9e953482a717a37f55f1)

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cardamomo
Is there any Firefox extension that provides comparable functionality?

~~~
gpm
You can install it directly via this addon: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/)

yoasif_ has confirmed that it works. Firefox has implemented some but not all
of chrome's webextension API, so this isn't guaranteed to work for all addons
(yet).

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andersonmvd
The license (WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License) grabbed my
attention. Seems to be even more permissive than MIT and BSD? At least the
name suggests.

~~~
fsck--off
Unless something has changed in the past 3 years, it's not a good license. See
DannyBee's comments about it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050)

