DevTab: Rebuilding Hackertab as a Private Firefox New Tab Extension

I have a strange pattern with browser extensions. I do not like installing too many of them, but I also keep finding small cases where I want the browser to behave in a way that is slightly more useful for me.

This happened before with my first Firefox extension, ImgBlock. I wanted something simple, local, understandable, and not one acquisition away from becoming adware. This time the itch was my new tab page.

I usually want my new tab to show useful developer news. Not a dashboard for my entire life, not a productivity religion, not a motivational quote with a blurred mountain in the background. Just a few useful sources that I already check anyway.

I found Hackertab.dev, and it was close to what I wanted. It had the right general idea: a developer news page with cards for sources like GitHub, Hacker News, and others.

But it was also a general public product. That means it had things I do not need, like server connections, analytics, ads, donations, authentication/accounts, external backend calls, multiple browser targets, and a larger collection of sources than I personally care about.

So I forked it and turned it into DevTab.

The goal was not to build a competing product. It was not even to make a polished public extension. The goal was much smaller: make a Firefox new tab extension that I can understand, build, sign, install, and maybe share with a couple of friends.

The commit history tells the story quite well. I started from something useful, then removed the parts that violated my privacy, add features that I don't want or like.

The first large pass was mostly subtraction. In the initial cleanup and refactor commit, I removed Amplitude, Sentry, Firebase, advertising components, donation prompts, auth flows, user account code, feature flags, remote configuration fetching, changelog code, RSS support, Product Hunt, Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode, FreeCodeCamp, Indie Hackers, Hackernoon, conference feeds, and other parts that made sense for Hackertab as a p…