# Comments Owl for Hacker News

> Makes it easer to follow comment threads on Hacker News across multiple visits, adds the ability to annotate and mute other users, plus some other UI and UX tweaks

Canonical page: [https://chrome-stats.com/d/hn-comments-owl](https://chrome-stats.com/d/hn-comments-owl)

## Overview

- **ID:** `hn-comments-owl`
- **Platform:** Firefox
- **Type:** Firefox add-on
- **Status:** Available
- **Publisher:** Jonny Buchanan
- **Category:** social-communication
- **Daily users:** 72
- **Rating:** 5.00 / 5 (2 ratings)
- **Version:** 3.8.1
- **Last updated:** 2026-05-04
- **First published:** 2019-08-17
- **Size:** 74 KB
- **Data as of:** 2026-09-10
- **Store listing:** [Firefox Add-ons Store](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/hn-comments-owl/)
- **Website:** [https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news#support](https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news#support)

## Description

Comments Owl for Hacker News enhances reading across visits by showing which items have new comments, highlighting updates, and collapsing threads with no new activity. It also enables annotating and muting other users, along with UI/UX tweaks for smoother navigation.

Key features span list pages, item pages, and navigation: show new comment counts and auto-collapse non-new threads on lists; highlight new comments on item pages, provide a left-aligned folding control, and allow muting users or adding notes to profiles; and streamline navigation with a configurable header, an upvoted link, and improved mobile layout.

## Rankings

- #13,566 — Overall
- #21 — ux
- #26 — hacker
- #42 — comment
- #46 — news
- #108 — hack

## Permissions and access

### Permissions

- `contextMenus`
- `storage`

### Content script matches

- `news.ycombinator.com`

## Safety

- **Risk impact:** Low risk impact
- **Risk likelihood:** Moderate risk likelihood

### Analysis details

- Injects scripts into web pages, which may alter or extract site contents, resulting in a substantial risk.
- This extension has low user count. Unpopular extensions may not be stable or safe.

> Some risk analysis details are omitted from this free response. [Upgrade to view the full analysis](https://chrome-stats.com/pricing).

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- [Hacker News Comment Collapse](https://chrome-stats.com/d/hacker-news-comment-collapse) — 8 users, 5.00 / 5

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Source: [Chrome-Stats](https://chrome-stats.com/d/hn-comments-owl)