There are a growing number of problem reports which are caused by the current bookmarklet failing (looks like about 63 currently) and they seem to boil down to two major problems: the first being that the current sharing bookmarklet uses a big block of JavaScript which provides a much better experience except when it conflicts with something on the page (e.g. duplicate jQuery errors on TheGuardian.com) and lately there’s been a large increase in the number of popular sites like medium.com which use Content-Security-Policy to prevent injected code from loading third-party scripts at all. CSP is becoming popular because it eats into adware, ISP tampering, etc. and I expect that trend to continue.
Here’s a suggestion for how to address this.
- Add a page on Newsblur.com where you can share any URL, so people have a fallback matter how broken the page environment gets.
- Make that page use the HTTP referer so a really simple bookmarklet could simply set document.location.href (which is still allowed even with CSP) to the sharing page and it’ll autofill the URL and snag the contents server-side (and, of course, always do the entire thing over HTTPS so the browser won’t strip the referer header).
- Have the rich sharing bookmarklet use either an error handler, timer, etc. to fall back to the previous approach if the full UI can’t be loaded — or maybe just do something as simple as setting a variable to check whether the user’s already tried to share the page and assume the second time won’t work any better.