I do use an extension for Firefox (though, it's a WebExtension that I've built myself. I have not yet announced it anywhere (first time here!) because I'm still occasionally working on making it ready for the masses.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/improve-hn/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/improve-hn/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/andriussev/improve-hn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andriussev/improve-hn</a><p>Comment hiding is kind of important because the trees CAN become fairly large. I read somewhere that it's coming natively to HN, so that's good.
<i>"how do you keep track of a long thread with many comments."</i><p>Top down, read the branch, skim the leaves. Only a certain portion may of be real interest.
With thread collapsing, new comment highlighting and auto-collapsing of threads without new comments.<p>On HN itself with a desktop browser: <a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees</a><p>On mobile this is a Progressive Web App using the HN Firebase API which implements these features: <a href="https://react-hn.appspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://react-hn.appspot.com/</a>
Recently I learned via an article on Hacker News the formal name for the phenomenon of looking at the gap between what a person understands and what they think they should understand: Information Anxiety. Richard Saul came up with it almost 30 years ago...and only just now I pick it up. The whole commercial internet and Windows 3 have happened in between.<p>Good luck.
I used to use the hacker news enhancement suite on chrome, it makes it alot more manageable.<p>I recently switched back to safari so am stuck using the default site, and it is much harder to navigate around.