Show HN: Honeybadger Chrome Extension

[tzaman]

The orange nearly killed my eyes. Apart from that, why do you use fake testimonials? I'm assuming that, since in the bottom you have a person, called "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard". The lady on the picture is Sarah Parmenter: http://ios-blog.co.uk/featured-posts/sarah-parmenter-web-and...

[hobs]

I think it might just be the pictures that are fake, not the actual testimonials.

[jaequery]

Please understand this is a beta release, I've cut many corners left and right to just get it out as it is.

[davidw]

Ok, but what's it doing behind the scenes? I'm not sure I'd trust something that's exchanging data about what I'm browsing with a lot of sites...

[jaequery]

Hi David, well I should make it clear that it does nothing else behind the scenes other than make an HTTP call to get website data only when you hit click to get the data, that's about the only thing it does. I get wary of other extensions too when I install but I can tell you this app does not track sites you browse if that's your concern (you can inspect it yourself and see).

[andyhmltn]

Nice little app! Just a little honest observation though: Is anything in the tech section actually true?

I just checked my personal site and it came up with technologies I've never heard of. It also said I use 'bitpay' for payments

[jaequery]

Thanks for pointing that out, there is a technical difficulty with the builtwith stats right now, looking into it.

[quasque]

Your whois lookup is broken for ac.uk domains - for example, all of these requests return the whois data for ac.uk itself, rather than the specified domain:

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/ox.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/cam.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/dur.ac.uk

(This list might help to uncover other problems like this: https://publicsuffix.org/)

[robmcm]

The fact you have a quote from "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard" with a photo of "Sarah Parmenter, Owner of You Know Who" makes me think you made them up.

I wonder how many testimonials on the web are actually real?

[outworlder]

That depends. Do you require them to be in their original context and be still current? If not, yes, I have seen some "real" ones.

[davidw]

> I wonder how many testimonials on the web are actually real?

88.231%, which is a bit higher than the number of made up statistics, coming in at 71.9231%.

[wbond]

Interesting little tool, however, the "Built With" section was 100% incorrect/random for the few sites I checked.

[ohadron]

For me as well. Seems completely random and false even for things that are extremely easy to detect such as Google Analytics.

[sullivanmatt]

I will start by saying that the site color scheme is pretty sharp for my eyes. I think you'll have a more polished look by having the background be white with a more neutral color palette.

For the extension itself: I like that it doesn't call out for information unless called upon, but if I ask for information about a site, I see no reason for you to have to collect the full URL and POST it to /track. That could lead to unexpected data leakage (as some URLs could be sensitive). You should probably get those API calls over to using HTTPS as well.

Also with every lookup, my console gets the log message "asdf", which is kind of weird. One thing I noticed is that the extension is pretty slow to get information. It appears it calls out for each item individually, and this leads to seven unique calls to your API that could be condensed into one request / response. If an API call fails with a 500 error, the entire stacktrace is dumped to the user. You'll want to disable debugging mode in your Express app to ensure that doesn't happen.

Since these APIs are public, you might want to consider rate limiting by IP, or you might find that your extension isn't the only consumer of them. A free and open WHOIS or Geolocation API that responds with JSON could be abused by other app developers, and having that already around moves the cost from them to you.

[gyardley]

It might be an awesome extension, but if it's not related to the company at honeybadger.io, you need to rename the thing.

Even if the similarity was completely inadvertent, it's just going to lead to confusion and legal hassle, and could end up hurting your reputation more than the functionality of the extension will help it.

[dingaling]

A more traditional name for honey badger is the Boer 'ratel'.

It's also catchier - might make a better product name.

[rubiquity]

Were you aware that an exception handling service named Honeybadger already exists?[0]

0 - https://honeybadger.io

[sergiotapia]

I actually thought this would integrate somehow to the service. So you're telling me this is completely unrelated to Honeybadger the company?

[hopeless]

What?! I actually thought this was a little side project by Honeybadger(.io). Poor form.

Added: using the same orange helped the deception.

[raghavb]

The most useful/interesting for me is the technology section. As that's not the easiest to get data about. Unfortunately the info that its giving is completely false/random. Checked it on a few websites that I've built or know the stack and the info shown is completely wrong.

www.builtwith.com provides much more information but they do not have a chrome plugin that I'm aware of. Definitely should check it out if your interested in this plugin.

[jaequery]

Could you give me an example of a site you did? Although I know it's not 100% accurate, from my experience, they were fairly accurate. I am pulling data from builtwith.com btw.

[bichiliad]

So you know, your "Leave Feedback" button seems to lead to a survey / feedback form for "Competition Tab," rather than Honeybadger.

Edit: For what it's worth, if the plugin really does what it says it does on the Chrome Webstore page, it sounds really, really useful. Will try later.

[jaequery]

I'm sure this extension will serve useful to you as it has done for me and my colleagues. Hope you enjoy it!

[drdaeman]

Mind-blown! I can't browse websites without it!

/s

[lorenzhs]

Injecting Google Analytics into each and every page I visit is not cool, mate... I uninstalled it again.

[uptownhr]

GA is not being injected into pages. it's only tracking the times you click on the extension button.

[mtford]

So, HN was built with Stiqr and reddit was built with Website Tonight...?

[jaequery]

Ah, I see what you guys are saying now. I'll have to look it up why its doing this!

[sudhirj]

The Technology section is completely off the mark and seems to be choosing servers and partners completely at random. Where are you pulling it from?

[jaequery]

yes its definitely off the mark at the moment, i'll be looking into it.

[LukeB_UK]

The site gives me absolutely no information about what this extension actually does. "Juicy informations" could literally be anything.

[king-coconut]

Doesn't really work, shows only a blank white window, no info visible on any of the sites I tried. Does the plugin work through www-proxy?

[sudhirj]

Am I the only one trying to figure out when the intro video was made based on the HN frontpage it shows?

[dewey]

May 16, 11:17 PM. Top right corner ;)

[icefox]

So what does it do? The text on the webpage doesn't actually say.

[Bassetts]

> At the mere click of a button, our honeybadger will let you see how much traffic the site gets, how much money they raised, what powers their stack, and much more.

[ryangripp]

Now we just need a Honeybadger Firefox edition