I made a thing and it sucks ass

It is not a big thing. It’s just a little utility that shows a hover preview when the mouse hovers a link. I think it’s kind of useful for checking where a link goes when I see text like “You can read more about that here”.

The thing is, it didn’t take me very long to make this. An hour or two including setting up the user script manager and whatnot. However, the issue is: I just keep finding edge cases. Here’s a couple of examples:

• Most sites don’t actually implement the OpenGraph protocol so the popups are kind of useless unless I also implement metadata extraction myself. For now I just extract a <title> if one is present but realistically I also need to generate a description/summary.
• Popups tend to ‘leak’ on SPAs because they simply remove the <a> tag from the DOM so the mouseleave event doesn’t fire. That’s pretty easy to handle; just treat element destruction like mouseleave.
• I have to use a proxy to get around CORS issues, but fetch doesn’t support actually using proxies and the proxy I use doesn’t handle redirects, so if a link leads to a redirect, I just get a generic NetworkError.

Each of these issues on their own isn’t the end of the world, but the cumulative time spent fixing bugs just isn’t worth it for a small, semi-useful utility.

This whole ordeal reminded me a lot of my uwuifier extension; a silly idea which ended up taking multiple iterations over the span of two years, APIs spanning the entire history of the DOM, and a way too intimate understanding of the DOM tree’s structure. And it’s still not finished! I stuck with that project, because I thought it was funny and some of my friends were using it, but I just don’t have that motivation this time.

The tl;dr is that I made a kind of useful utility, but to implement it fully would require a disproportionate amount of work. So much work that I don’t think I’ll finish the thing. And that’s why I hate making stuff for the web.