Tusk

Tell your friends. The Elephant raises her head in proud defiance. I'm pleased to announce version 2024.8.2, the first update since 2018 😮. Available for Firefox and Chrome.

❗Having problems? ⛔ Authorization error? Read the troubleshooting guide.

Why now?

Google is requiring extension developers to either upgrade to Manifest Version 3 (MV3) or get taken down. Tusk still has ~50K weekly active users at the time I wrote this post. I wanted those people to be able to continue to use Tusk.

Plans for the future

I have un-archived the Github repository to begin accepting new issues again, and will do my best to keep things in working order and responding to reports. I don't expect to build any new features, but I'd like to at least make sure the existing features work properly and reliably.

I want to emphasize that my goal here is not to continue to grow Tusk's user base. It's just one of a number of great options in the ecosystem. The goal is simply to maintain Tusk as a trustworthy and stable tool.

What changed?

The bulk of this update can be filed under a couple of topics.

• Manifest and Chrome API Updates. The biggest change to the Web Extension API between 2 and 3 is a migration to service workers rather than background processes. Tusk was already using all the right hooks and made the switch to service workers easily. There were some security changes to the scope of that runtime context (no more document or window access) that also didn't give me much trouble.
• Google Drive integration improvements, notes below.
• Some bug fixes to the Shared URLs provider. TL;DR only Dropbox shared urls and direct links still work in 2024.
• Clipboard clear. Due to changes in the MV3 api, Tusk is no longer able to clear the clipboard after a set period of time when you copy your password. I'm exploring using chrome.offscreen as an alternative to the Clipboard API.
• Dropped support for PCloud. At some point in the past, PCloud deleted my whole developer account and application keys. I attempted to make a new account, but their developer portal is broken. Tusk no longer offers PCloud as a provider.
• Build system updates. Trying to revive the old build system after not touching it for 6 years proved challenging. It was based on Webpack and who knows what version of Node.js. Seven or something, I have no idea. After a little bit of tinkering, I decided to scrap the whole build system and upgrade to Vite.js. Browser support for JS language features is much better now than it was in 2018.

Changes to Google Drive Integration

It's been a struggle. The result is an dramatically improved, more secure Google Drive integration. It will also hopefully be more stable and handle expired tokens better.

Before I came along, Tusk was written to request full read/write access to a user's entire Google Drive for the purpose of searching for *.kdbx files. Google used to be OK with this, but they've cracked down in recent years and now, developers asking for that level of access are subject to a litany of additional verification requirements culminating in something called CASA verification. I don't h