Show HN: Flashbang – DuckDuckGo bangs resolved locally with a Service Worker

t3ntxcles 15 points 1 comment July 14, 2026
flashbang-dyr.pages.dev · View on Hacker News

I like to use DuckDuckGo-style bangs and snaps, they are fast and efficient shortcuts. However, neither Kagi nor DuckDuckGo resolves them as quickly as I would like and subjectively Google has better search results than DuckDuckGo. After trying a few local alternatives eg. unduck, unduckified, I wasn't satisfied, the ones I tried briefly loaded a page before redirecting causing visible page flickering, still took time to resolve the actual redirect and lacked advanced features (address-bar autocomplete). Flashbang avoids that by handling the redirect in a Service Worker, before the browser renders anything. On my machine, the added ove rhead is around 0.14ms. It has 14,470 bangs, custom shortcuts, address-bar suggestions, and works offline once installed (except for suggestions). No runtime dependencies. Try it: https://flashbang-dyr.pages.dev Code: https://github.com/ph1losof/flashbang

Discussion Highlights (1 comments)

Sayrus

I always found redirects to be wasteful on mobile connections where latency and packet losses are frequent. Interestingly Firefox, I get latency that are way worse than Chromium (Median 0.46ms vs 1.2ms, P99 1.3ms vs 1.8ms).

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