Optimizing Performance: How Our Extension Became Lightning Fast

People think of browser extensions as brittle: a site changes its CSS selectors, and bam the extension breaks.

But I think the opposite: it's wild how *resilient* browser extensions often are!

Consider the context: I can extend any aspect of a webapp UI, with zero support or foresight by the original app devs... and it actually works?

I've built exten... See more

tools developers and operators can implement today to ensure continued high performance

Today’s web browsers are relatively composable - you can add new functionality and features with extensions. Imagine if web browsers were locked down, and you had to choose between the core feature set alone: Chrome with built-in casting, Firefox with Pocket, or Brave with a crypto wallet. Thankfully you don't have to choose and be left so wanting ... See more

The modern browser extension API has done a good job balancing extensibility with security, and yet we’re still grappling with the consequences of browser extensions invading people’s privacy. Giving extensions more power would raise the stakes further. Still, we shouldn’t give up in the name of security—we should fight for extensibility as a value... See more

(2) Make it faster to get what you need,

1. Synthetic Data for Baseline Metrics¶

Synthetic data can be used to establish baseline precision and recall metrics for your reverse search. The simplest kind of synthetic data is to take existing text chunks, generate synthetic questions, and verify that when we query our synthetic questions, the sourced text chunk is retrieved correctly.

Benefi... See more