Show HN: Orange Juice — Small UX improvements that make HN much easier to read

What it is

Orange Juice is a browser extension that aims to shave away the tiny frictions that make Hacker News feel clunky over time. Read faster, reply in context, and keep your flow — that’s the pitch. Tired of jumping between pages just to quote someone? This extension lets you reply inline and select text to quote in one motion. Small change. Big payoff.

How it helps

The feature list reads like a tidy wishlist for heavy HN users: unread comment highlighting and hide-read controls so you don’t re-scan the same thread; keyboard shortcuts for favoriting and navigating so your hands stay where the brain is; hover previews of user profiles and small follow buttons that spin up a combined /following feed without inventing a whole new UI. It caches recent activity locally for speed and offers per-user refresh controls, and it even renders Mermaid diagrams directly in threads. The goal is preserving the original HN feel while cutting out the tedium.

Trust, code, and installs

The project is open source under GPLv3 and, according to its authors, ships with extensive unit tests and CI/CD automation — “not vibe coded,” they say with a wink. It has been reported that AI was used as a pair programmer to speed implementation and review, though the team states that architecture and final decisions remained human. Installs are available from the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons, both with automatic updates.

Why this matters

This is the classic tech paradox: tiny UX annoyances add up to real friction. Orange Juice doesn’t try to reinvent Hacker News; it nudges it. Will it change the way the community reads and replies daily? Maybe. But for anyone who treats HN as a morning ritual, shaving seconds off each interaction adds up to minutes of better, less interrupted thinking — and that matters. Worth a sip?

Sources: oj-hn.com, Hacker News