Giant Bomb Turbo (browser extension)

Hello my dudes and dudettes! I created a browser extension called "Giant Bomb Turbo". It lets you customize various parts of the homepage for now.

• Hide homepage modules
• Rearrange order of homepage modules
• Display "Latest" as a grid
• Make header image less tall

Here's what my homepage looks like now:

And here are my settings to achieve this look:

There are other things I would like to add to this, and I'm curious to hear what you all would like added. Let me know!

Source on GitHub

Download for Chrome

Download for Firefox

Oh, nice. This will do until they fix the website. Thank you.

That looks great! Devs if you're watching that screenshot is what a front page should look like.

Question/request: EDIT! found it, you did the thing i was going to ask for and allowed me to shrink (Emsmallen i love it) the header.

2nd request in that case, I don't see coming up on giant bomb any more, i would like that to take up the side of the screen where the header is now so they share that space, if that isnt coming back due to the redesign (boo) then i'd like to put the staff tweets there.

ps- any black magic you can do to bring back the meta info from the cards? like "posted by Jan Ochoa" or by "Abby Russell"?

Amazing work!

I was nearly motivated to learn whatever language i would have had to to make an extension myself. I'm almost disappointed i don't have to now, but you did so much better then i ever could have.

@tanstaafl: I've seen Coming up on the front page since the redeisgn. It must be replaced by something ("Live now on GB Infinite"?) when the upcoming list is empty.

@lcom: Yup, that's what I've noticed

Nice, it looks much better honestly.

Little changes, but they help a bunch—especially displaying latest as a grid. Much appreciated!

wow very nice :)

Much better, site is actually usable now.

this fixes SO many issues.

devs! home page should look like this! steal this and make the styling changes and you'll be golden :)

Awesome! I didn't necessarily have many problems with the layout, but having customization options is always great.

Looks great! Any chance you can port this to Firefox?

@tomydingo: I am planning on a Firefox version too

So I like the site redesign as-is...and am kind of getting annoyed by people telling the devs what they should do as if theirs is the only opinion that matters. Those of us who aren't spamming the devs or bashing the redesign all of the time must like it well enough to remain silent. I hope the devs are looking at the unique visitor numbers versus those who complain instead of just reading these comments bashing their hard work or saying "until the devs fix the site". I don't pretend to know the amount of work that went into the redesign, but I imagine it would suck to read such comments and would probably be pretty demoralized by them. I'm fine with providing feedback, but let's remember these are hard working people with feelings, so let's phrase our complaints politely.

Thanks OP for creating this so that people who want this can have it.

@lokihellfire2008: Agreed 100% everything you said. I am a web developer myself professionally, and I created this because I know it's impossible, given time/resource constraints, to make everyone happy.

I'm hoping a tool like this for the power users (of which I count myself) could be helpful. That's why I want to get Firefox + Safari versions going so almost everyone is covered. Please share the link (to this thread- I'll update the top post as new versions are released) so people know about this option.

Also, I almost *have* to try to get a light mode going, it seems like the biggest feature request. So I'll probably take a stab at that soon.

BTW, the extension is open source, available on GitHub.

If you're a fellow dev and want to add features, PRs are welcome.

If you're a user and want to file bugs/feature requests, you can use the issues tab.

@lokihellfire2008: Totally agreed. Nothing about the site is "unusable" and the redesign rolls in some long standing requests. More customization options are always better, but anyone making complaints has a severe lack of appreciation for the amount of effort it takes to make any of these changes happen, especially on a site with such a scale as this one.

Thank you so much for this. The customization is amazing. Great work!

Awesome work. Maybe someone on staff will actually see this.

Oh bugger off. It's very easy to appreciate an effort while not liking the result of that effort. According to your logic, this site should not exist at all, because a large part of the content on here consists of complaining about the result of other people's work. Just like a reviewer can dislike a video game (which requires far more effort to make than a website), GB visitors can dislike a site design.

This is great. Is it possible to add a toggle for dark / light and bring back the light theme?

@theadmin: I'm going to try

Firefox version is out now! Updating top post...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giant-bomb-turbo/

Hmm, I am also getting that. I emailed Mozilla support about it. They responded and said it "works for them"... *sigh*

Maybe it's because it just got added. I'll try again tomorrow and if it's still happening, reply back to them.

Sorry about that!

I hope @danauer has seen this.

Hmmm, this is just what I was wanting. Now if a white theme could be implemented somehow that would be perfect. Awesome work duder, thank you!

@tomba_be: There's a distinct difference between saying "this is not what I prefer" and "this is broken", and someone calling something broken because they don't like it is 1. wildly self centered 2. a way harsher piece of feedback than is due to a project that (by all other measures other than personal taste) is a fully functioning and quietly impressive feat.

I have no idea what you think my logic is if you somehow found yourself at "this site should not exist".

So you are not saying that anyone making complaints has a severe lack of appreciation? I must have misread your comment? I am complaining because I don't like the redesign. According to you I do not appreciate the effort that went into the new design. Please point out the flaw in my logic?

And if I apply your logic to video games, this site should indeed not exist. Do you think not a lot of effort went into making The Quiet Man, for example? I'm quite sure even more effort went into that game. It's also fully functioning and I'm also quite sure 99.9% of the people visiting this site could not create it, which also makes it impressive. And as far as I can see, the official standpoint from the GB crew on this game is: it's garbage. So are they wildly self centered? Is the game due friendlier feedback because a lot of effort went into making it?

Hey all, the Firefox version is now fixed!

Chrome version (and probably others):

Seems popular is unable to be edited at all, now. I also noticed they changed latest thumbnails to be leftmost in a carousel, so it could be related to that change.

Thanks for this. Any possibility you could restore the original Forum Activity element? The "latest from the community" thing doesn't do anything useful unless you want to read some guy's blog from 2 months ago. I'd much rather see the latest 10 forum posts.

I appreciate how much work it must have been, but i can't ignore the fact that the results are terrible, and the site is harder to use than it's ever been, for me.

On topic, this is awesome, i try not to use extensions like this but i might be tempted to give it a try as it looks really good. I wonder if any official changes are on the way, or if everyone is happy with how it turned out.

I guess they updated something with the page, but now popular videos are showing before my "display latest as grid" despite being toggled off. Also the popular carousal can not be moved at all.

Update pretty please?

thank you again!

thanks for this ^^ it definitely seems to mitigate alot of the new designs hassle at first glace ( just grabbed it a couple mins ago). if theres anything i'd like to ask if could be added was an option to not take away but shrink the 'billboards' i like having the 'upcoming' stuff but that dumb ( altho nice in a way) premium box is an eye-sore in how big it is. it would just be nice to be rid of the one and keep the other but i assume that would be more difficult.

I will take a look at the issues with the "Popular" carousel soon.

Issues like this could happen as they change the site around, so not totally unexpected.

Regarding moving the "Upcoming" stuff, I have ideas about that, might be possible.

Nice!

Could there be the option to turn the header off?

The old GB QoL extension added an emote tab to chats on streams to click emote thumbnails. Any chance we may get this feature in the future?

Hey just wanted to let everyone know I've updated the extension and fixed the issue with the "Popular" section.

I've also added a new header option - "mini" - which shrinks the header and places the upcoming schedule next to it. Here's a screenshot:

'mini' looks great with the upcoming next to it , thanks for this ^^

Great! 8.8

@johnsolo: would you mind posting a little tutorial on how the extension is coded? I’m thinking of taking a stab at some things and doing a PR.

Having a bit of a bug with "Mini." The top carousel shows a play triangle icon over the leftmost thumbnail in the top carousel. When I click on it, it plays the featured video instead of opening the thumbnailed page.

The fact that someone had to make a browser extension for the site just shows how much of a step backwards the new site design is. Thanks for the extension dude! It makes all this so much less of a headache (if it weren't for premium content, I wouldn't use the site at all).

@flashflood_29: I just uploaded a fixed version. Should be published to the chrome/firefox stores in a few hours

@theadmin: Sure, these instructions assume you are familiar with browser extension development.

The extension is a Vue+Vuex app. The vuex store is in src/store and contains the options set from the popup (what header size, which modules to hide, etc).

The vuex store is shared with the injected script, so it can read what options the user has set in the popup. See src/inject/App.vue for the injected script. At the top, it watches for changes in the config and does different things based on what options are selected.

A common thing that's done is adding a css class to the body, for example in line 24 of App.vue, if the user has selected the small header size, it adds the css class of gbt-emsmallen to the body.

Then, in the file headerSmall.scss, I have css set up to make the header smaller when that class is on the body.

Another thing App.vue might do is some DOM manipulation, when it is created. Look at the created() function on line 105. This js is run once when the page is loaded. Here I do things like clone the "Upcoming" box for the mini header, and make the homepage modules draggable.

Let me know if you have any other questions. The github README.md has instructions for running in dev mode. If you have familiarity with browser extension dev + Vue, you should be able to jump right in.