A useful feature! I have this available to me as part of Refined Hacker News [1], which does a bit more. But if you only want the user popup, a slim extension is nice.
Seems to struggle with about pages that have too much information.
I get "loading..." for both @matznerd (8 paragraphs of text) and @some_furry (ascii art). At first they don't load but after trying, going back to these two users a few times... I was able to get @matznerd's about page to load.
(note, as I write this... just 7 comments total)
Never had success @some_furry (ascii art + text). Maybe too many lines?
About pages with little information load quickly.
I like but still testing... I've tried quite a few HN extensions and always seem to go back to no-frills HN. There's something about HN's defaults that make it work for me (less external noise, focus on article/comments?).
I decided to test the extension again and figured out what the "loading..." issue is.
When the extension displays the about page, it does so in a popUp box. This popUp box needs room on the screen. Usually this popUp box is quite small.
@matznerd's page wouldn't load sometimes because his comment was basically centered on my screen. There wasn't enough space to create the popUp box needed to display his larger about page profile.
When I scrolled the page - pushing @matznerd's comment to the top of my screen - the extension would load his about page instantly - in a super large (centered) popUp box.
@some_furry never loaded because (1) his comment was too low on the page (not enough room to generate the very large centered popUp box) and (2) his about page was too many lines. @some_furry's about page was never going to load because there was never going to be enough space on the screen to generate the popUp box.
The blinking "Loading..." was not that it was trying to retrieve the about page. Retrieving the about page was never the issue. It was trying to generate the popUp box and failing. Each time it failed, we would see "Loading..." again - which is why it kept blinking.
Hi HN, thanks for testing this out. Big thanks to https://github.com/TomasHubelbauer for the changes, I have merged them and It looks cleaner now! The review may take a while, about 24 hours for these changes to appear but you can still install this directly.
PS: Apparently some users flagged this, maybe because it interferes with their HN Experience and they wouldn't want others to try it (which is sad, at least let them try it out, maybe they would find it useful), or maybe some think its about viewing Karma, but no, It simply helps you view the profile, just as you would normally, but without navigating to another page.
Also, am I the only one who doesn't click on profiles?
It's reminds me of being at a party or a bar and there is always one person that will inevitably ask who you voted for, usually in the middle of thought provoking discussions.
I suspect those type of people are the type that scan through profiles looking for what?
Now, if profiles had images and custom css like myspace.....
[1] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news