Browser Snippets Beta
Hey everyone 👋
I'm Marcus, long time IH lurker and creator of Browser Snippets.
Browser Snippets makes it easy to write and share JS snippets that you and your team can run on any site at the click of a button. Think bookmarklets, but easier to manage.
The MVP was focused on snippets for a single user. This is the stage I decided to launch the private beta to start getting feedback and work through bugs.
The next step is an open beta, where anyone who visits the site can sign up. My goal for that stage is to get the teams and snippet sharing built (and a landing page would help too).
BUT... before that time, I'd like to invite you to join my private beta using this magic link (which opens up the registration form)
Any feedback, good or bad, is welcome and encouraged. If you're keen to see behind the scenes of my late night builds and general progress – you can follow me on instagram: @marcusmichaels
Hmm this is good. I like the onboarding and I got it to work so that's good.
You can make it even better by removing the description, adding automatic code highlighting and giving examples for what should a person enter. Add placeholder text for the title(and make the title optional too), add placeholder for the actual snippet too.
But the biggest thing is that this shouldn't require an account. Just add this form inside the browser popup and you will get a lot more traction.
Great tips, thank you. And yeah not having to set up an account probably would gain more traction. I’ve tried to make it similar to Reddit where we don’t need your email so it can be as quick as possible. The reason accounts are needed though is so people can log in and use on different computers, store their snippets, and (eventually) have teams.
Hey Marcus, and congrats for the private beta phase 🎉
I'm now using Tampermonkey for my usescripts. How does Browser Snippets compare to it (or other userscript managers like Greasemonkey)?
One idea I got from your screenshot there that would bring value to me is to have a big list of ready-made snippets out of the box. Like "high contrast", "hide all images", "dark mode", "make hidden inputs visible", "make body scrollable again" etc. Now I only have very site-specific snippets (at Tampermonkey) but I bet there are a ton of small snippets that would work on most sites that I don't know about.
Hey @jehna,
Thank you! Tampermonkey looks really popular, I haven’t seen it before but it looks powerful. From what I can tell, you need to set it up for specific sites? Browser Snippets is more generic, like an evolution of the bookmarklet.
And thank you for your idea, it validates a thought I’ve already had to have list of ore-defined snippets for different types of users (like accessibility checkers). The plan is to evolve this into a snippet library but that’s my next step after adding teams
Tampermonkey is old, so it has its user base 😄
It supports both site-specific and global scripts using wildcards. It uses comments as metadata, so you can share full snippets as text to others (e.g. name and domain matching comes from the comment metadata).
But I think there's plenty of room for competition. Good luck!