pixiebrix/pixiebrix-extension

PixieBrix browser extension

PixieBrix is a browser extension and platform for safely extending your favorite websites and SaaS applications with low/no-code.

In addition to the extension, we maintain pixiebrix.com, a registry of bricks and pre-made mods. You can create a PixieBrix account to enable support for team features, such as shared integration configurations and team bricks.

Chrome
last 2 versions

Example Uses

Whenever you notice yourself switching back and forth between browser tabs, it's a great time to use PixieBrix:

• Add a button to Apartments.com to send your favorite apartment listings to a Google sheet
• Show Google Scholar results on a person's LinkedIn profile
• Embed a YouTube video in your employee training site

Our Principles

We're building PixieBrix because we believe three things:

1. There is no such thing as an "average user"
2. Everyone should be empowered to customize their software to give them superpowers
3. Computing should be delightful

We’ve set out to create low/no-code tools for customizing the behavior of software, web pages, and SaaS. But, we won’t be able to do it alone. That’s why we’re also working hard to build a diverse and vibrant community of makers.

Documentation

For documentation, see our Documentation site.

Contributing

PixieBrix is an open source project, and we're delighted by community contributions. Please refer to the Contributing file for more information.

See the wiki for instructions for setting up a local build.

License

PixieBrix provides this project under a dual license model to meet the development and distribution needs of both commercial distributors (such as OEMs and VARs) and open source projects.

Developers who use or distribute open source applications under the AGPL can use the AGPL-licensed PixieBrix software, and OEMs and VARs that do not want to combine or distribute the PixieBrix software with their own commercial software under an AGPL license can purchase a commercial license.

Why not X?

We're avid users of browser extensions, bookmarklets, and userscripts. They'll always each have their place. We're building PixieBrix to bring their power to a broader audience. See our Wiki for a full comparison.

pixiebrix-extension's Issues

Improve marketplace UX

• List view instead of cards
• Searchable
• List services used
• Tags, e.g., sites covered, services used (e.g., Slack)
• Detail page w/ YAML

Add contextMenu editing support to Page Editor

Improve error messages for Google Sheets

• spreadsheet not found
• pixiebrix configuration error caused by the oauth client being set wrong

Export headers for the built-in bricks and extension points

Export metadata for built-in bricks and extensions points so we can add placeholders in the registry

Add environment banner for dev/staging

Fix the GitHub build

Add support for OpenAPI/Swagger

Support pulling in a OpenAPI/Swagger specification when making API calls

References:

• https://swagger.io/docs/specification/data-models/keywords/

Move template engine and brick evaluation to Chrome sandbox

References/Documentation:

• Chrome: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/manifest/sandbox
• Firefox: not supported by Firefox
  • https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webextension-sandboxing-eval/13659
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/user_scripts
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1398662

Bump css-selector-generator

Add ability to run an effect on a parent/target tabs

Enable an effect to run on the tab that opened it

Add support for text selection context menus

Write developer documentation

Write developer documentation for developers building/running locally

• Environment file
• Build commands
• https://v2.docusaurus.io/

Drag and drop devtools support

Code splitting

Split code, necessary because Firefox has file size limits in extensions. Will also provide parsing performance benefit for startup

• icons
• widgets
• jq-web because it use web asm under the hood
• ace code editor

Also probably need to adjust the manifests to support loading the files

Prior Art:

• https://github.com/crimx/webpack-target-webextension
• https://github.com/jacksteamdev/rollup-plugin-bundle-imports#readme

Problems with Firefox

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536094
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1451545

Add support for Firefox

References:

• https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext
• https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/submitting-an-add-on/

Firefox does not support extenally_connectable yet, so need a different way to exchange the token. Discussion:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1319168
• https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/using-runtime-sendmessage-api-from-webpages/36984

Subtasks:

• Split webpack configs and add Firefox manifest
• Remove dependency on extenally_connectable
• Code splitting because Mozilla upload/signing only supports modules < 4mb. See #95

Add semantic web/microdata reader

Add Vue.js agent support

Automatically infer output schemas for readers

Ideally support incremental inference:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/generate-schema
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/to-json-schema

Add Zapier support

Add support for @local scope bricks

Add support for @local scope bricks that are saved/stored in local storage

Upgrade to webpack 5

Plugin blockers:

• Extension loader plugin: rubenspgcavalcante/webpack-extension-reloader#110

Dynamic content script permissions

https://github.com/fregante/webext-dynamic-content-scripts

Refactor extension messaging protocol

Devtools usability improvements

Devtools feature flagging

Extension point log in Workshop

• Errors with context, extension, brick, service, etc.
• Show which brick/service caused the error
• Filter by level
• Pagination

Improve log stream

• show inputs to bricks
• show output from bricks

Support composite readers in the Page Editor

Add UIPath orchestrator support

Add privacy-friendly usage analytics

Add key to Chrome staging builds

https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/manifest/key

Google BigQuery support

Feature flags

Feature flags to help control rollout of beta features

Brick selection UX

Brix selection search instead of the dropdown

• Name
• Id
• Description

Add OAuth2 support

Add utility CSS library for styling templates

Can use Tailwind CSS, but trim what what we don't need (e.g., media queries). Will also want to prefix with a pb- prefix to avoid collisions

• https://tailwindcss.com/
• https://github.com/salesforce-ux/postcss-slds-prefix

Automatically re-activate blueprint in brick editor

By default, automatically replace the user's currently installed blueprint with the new one they just saved when they are editing it in the brick editor

Panel template inference improvements

Page editor UX improvements

Support multiple menus on a page

• support multiple menus, e.g., for table rows, etc.
• each menu has its own reader context

Context menu template page

Add testing infrastructure

• mocks/fakes for scripts calling into background page
• axios mocks

Setup testing infrastructure

• Mocks
• GitHub CI

Lodash overriding version on page

Breaks websites using older versions of lodash, e.g., Jira's active sprint page

• webpack/webpack#4465
• lodash/lodash#2671

Fix context menu lifecycle bugs

Add XPath transformer support

Action to fill out a form

Marketplace activation wizard

• Select which extensions to activate
• Have users select configurations as part of installation
• Grant necessary permissions

Add eslint support

• pre-commit hook
• configuration

Devtools panel integration