9 ms·

What Apple Gives You for $100 as a Safari Extension Developer

187 points by Lazare 10y ago

chillacy 10y ago
Having developed a safari extension for my mac app I have to agree. Compared to the app store process, safari extensions feel like an afterthought to Apple. For instance to update the app, you have to go to the submission page and resubmit your app, filling in all the details over again.
cpolis 10y ago
duplicate post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306964
NKCSS 10y ago
Biggest surprise: "Developers are paying $100 a year and Apple doesn’t even host the extension themselves."
- bangonkeyboard 10y ago
  They do, actually. Not that hosting a few dozen kilobytes makes it any better.
NKCSS 10y ago
Has Google dropped the requirement to pay for your Chrome Extention? I remember having to register and pay a fee to publish my Chrome extention [1] last year. From the article: "The $100 per year fee, which doesn’t have to be paid to publish to any other browser." [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nkcss-funda-images-downlo/bdhghkjaeodhaflkohpjfbidhbiincjc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nkcss-funda-images... [edit] Found it ([2]): "Before you publish your first app, you must pay a one-time $5 developer signup fee. A reminder in the dashboard will appear until you pay the fee." It's not $100, but I remembered having to pay 'something'. [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish#pay-the-developer-signup-fee https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish#pay-the-develo...
- Flammy 10y ago
  Pretty sure Google Chrome's dev fee is a $5 one time per account charge from when I was using it last year...
  - londons_explore 10y ago
    It's basically an anti spam charge
- danielsamuels 10y ago
  Weird, I have several Chrome extensions published and I've never paid anything.
  - _kyran 10y ago
    Older dev accounts did not have this fee.
Fnoord 10y ago
All this from one of the largest tax evaders in the world. Is this $100 per extension or $100 per developer? If the latter, make a non profit organisation as 3rd party who pays the fee and allow others to join it for free.
- scarlac 10y ago
  Per developer
  - liaocs2008 10y ago
    I see... There must be a lot of people developing RES which would cost much.
    - BillinghamJ 10y ago
      No, it's per Apple developer account which will be publishing the extension. So RES only needs one. If the person who publishes RES also publishes others, that person still only needs one.
- soneil 10y ago
  The cost doesn't appear to be the actual problem. It's more a case of "adding insult to injury". The problem is basically one of jumping through hoops - but the hoops are poorly defined, poorly maintained, constantly moving and often nonsensical. Having to pay for the privilege is just the icing on the cake.
- newscracker 10y ago
  > All this from one of the largest tax evaders in the world. Where did you get that from? Or are you mixing up utilizing existing tax laws and legal loopholes with evasion? Or is it a reference to the EU tax ruling of $14 billion that's still in courts? Wikipedia says, "Tax evasion is the illegal evasion of taxes by individuals, corporations, and trusts."
- johnnydoe9 10y ago
  Ah, the Dallas Buyers Club. Apple will stomp on that shit hard though.
orf 10y ago
Just drop safari support. Vote with your feet, so to speak.
lol768 10y ago
> they will not auto update when you release new versions Wouldn't it be possible to do the auto-updating logic yourself? Is there something preventing this? I assume extensions can store stuff with localStorage, so what's to stop you downloading the code and eval'ing it?
- sangnoir 10y ago
  Out-of-band updates sound like a hole Apple would want to plug in the near future. The review process is entirely pointless when the the developer can bypass it via subsequent updates.
shakna 10y ago
So... This last year in Safari Extension world: * $100 buy in. Yearly. (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera... No license fees.) * Long, bug-prone, and somewhat idiotic review process. * No way to charge for an extension, to recoup that $100. So its ads or nothing. * Installation page only. No reviews. No real information. Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't automatically update the extension. What's coming in Safari Extension world: * The $100 fee is staying. * Xcode requirement. You'll need a Mac to publish. * Swift/Objective-C requirement. No more HTML/JS/CSS only. * Mac store listing, which means you can charge for extensions. But the Mac Store isn't known for a nice review process. * Hugely lacking documentation. Hopefully this'll change... But Apple doesn't have a good track record here. Result: Reddit Enhancement Suite has to decide between not publishing for one of the major browsers, or paying out for a longer, harder to maintain process, to achieve the same thing as they already do for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera. Personal anecdote: Apple seems to hate their own developers. This story, others, and my own experiences tell me that Apple makes everything more difficult than need be to put together a program, small or large, that actually runs on their platform. Swift was a step in the right direction, a nice language, a decent Open Source effort, and cross platform to boot. But Safari... Safari lacks in so many areas that it's progress on JS doesn't matter much. Isolating those who build for it is unhelpful. It almost seems like Apple want Safari to die.
- bangonkeyboard 10y ago
  > Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't automatically update the extension. There's a comment on the post disputing this possibility.
  - shakna 10y ago
    True, I guess one could concievably build your own update mechanism. But that's even more overhead than what is necessary for all the other browsers, who let you use their stores and update mechanism for much less than $100/developer/year.
    - 10y ago
wouterinho 10y ago
We also had the same issues with (trying) to publish an extension to the Safari gallery: long waiting times, unclear communication, publishing without notification, etc. Besides that, the move towards the requirement of Xcode does not bode well for managing a multi-browser codebase in JS. Google and to a lesser extent Mozilla are doing way better on this and seem way more experienced in handling the extension ecosystem.
mrweasel 10y ago
I'm wondering if Apple decided to charge the $100 to have a "curated" set of extensions. There are thousand of extensions available for Firefox and Chrome, and most of them are junk. Maybe the thought that Apple had was that charging the $100 would leave them with a smaller set of extensions, with higher quality. I'm not really sure it's working, sure there's fewer extensions, but still a large number of weird ones.
- dx034 10y ago
  Reviews work much better for that than a $100 sign up fee.
- paulgb 10y ago
  If that's the intent, I think the effect will be opposite. The extensions they get will be the ones with the highest profit motive (ads, data collection, etc.) since they are the ones that can most easily overlook the $100 fee.
fowlerpower 10y ago
Apple is headed down the path that the old Microsoft was headed. Which they, Microsoft, have ironically backed away from. I guess what I'm saying is that in some ways Safari is the new IE, but without the same reach. The same kind of vendor lock in and shitty expensive tooling.
- JohnTHaller 10y ago
  Apple is worse in many ways. The situation with Safari on iOS with it being the only rendering engine you can use is akin to Microsoft forbidding other browsers on Windows and only allowing browser skin UIs that sit atop IE6.
  - pier25 10y ago
    I've reported numerous iOS bugs in the webkit project and most of the times I never get answer. I also frequently report bugs in the Chromium project and I usually get an answer in less than an hour. Never a bug I reported was ignored, legitimate or not. Recently I wrote an article criticising iOS from a dev perspective and posted a tweet from a core webkit member: > that's because they have a lot more engineers and evangelists/dev-rel than Apple ...referring to Google and the Chromium project. Well, hours after I published the article the Twitter user was deleted. Here's the article in question: https://medium.com/@Pier/why-i-hate-ios-as-a-developer-459c182e8a72 https://medium.com/@Pier/why-i-hate-ios-as-a-developer-459c1...
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > Apple is headed down the path that the old Microsoft was headed. Exactly. > Which they, Microsoft, have ironically backed away from. Are you really sure that Microsoft backed away from this path? Just google about "Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions)" and inform yourself how Windows 10 uses/plans to use them. To help you a little bit for researching on this topic, here are two references: > https://sec.ch9.ms/slides/winHEC/03_WindowsSecurity.pdf https://sec.ch9.ms/slides/winHEC/03_WindowsSecurity.pdf > http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows%2010%20Fall%20Update.pdf http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows...
roryisok 10y ago
Another stupid decision by apple. Next they'll probably go after this party browsers, try and pull some stunt to force people to use Safari- some unique macos feature which only safari can access or something
- clintonb 10y ago
  They already have such a feature: Apple Pay can only be used in Safari for web payments.
vortico 10y ago
All this because many users prefer the Extension Gallery or are unable to install extensions manually. The only way to move away from centralized services is for users to stop using them. Unfortunately, the typical Safari user doesn't seem to me as the tech-savvy person willing to learn how to do this.
vfaronov 10y ago
> All four of the other browsers use effectively the same APIs — Safari is potentially going to change that in some ugly ways. I understand a developer’s desire to have more reach with less work. But if all browsers have the same APIs, for the same feature set, with the same UI... then what is the point of having different browsers? If Safari’s API changes lead to extensions that are better integrated with the underlying platform (and I don’t know if that is the case), I say all the power to them.
- callahad 10y ago
  Core APIs for common functions (intercept these network requests, inject these stylesheets, etc.) are being standardized so you don't have to reinvent the wheel on every damn browser. Browsers can also freely implement additional, non-standard add-on APIs that make sense for their product, while the APIs that aren't distinguishing features can get out of the way and Just Work, everywhere. For example, Opera has a sidebar API, while Chrome does not. This is good, and allows browsers to compete on privacy, performance, security, support for web standards, ui/ux, etc.
jsz0 10y ago
Just the other day I had a few Chrome extensions stop working and sure enough they're disabled because 'This extension contains malware'. Never had that problem with Safari so maybe the $100 isn't such a bad deal after all.
- Insanity 10y ago
  So you are saying that the exact same thing could not happen on the apple store or whatever it is called? Except then your extension would be disabled _AND_ you'd have lost $100
gurkendoktor 10y ago
Same experience here: Lots of confusing mails after my submission, needed to re-submit a few times, and never received a notification about my extension going live. I wouldn't have noticed the Safari Extensions menu item without watching WWDC videos, anyway. On the Mac App Store, besides copy-pasting some Swift/Objective-C, you also need to come up with a UI for your app. It'll probably be a storyboard with a single window that lets users know how to activate your extension, but getting the details right without prior experience in Cocoa development will eat some of your precious dev time.
yalogin 10y ago
What happens to your apps if you stop paying the annual fee? Will they be removed from the AppStore? Will there be no auto updates on them?
thenextman 10y ago
First, you can auto update extensions distributed via your own web server. It says so right in Apple’s docs how to do it: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/UpdatingExtensions/UpdatingExtensions.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009977-CH12-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To... Second, he writes: “Maintenance of Safari Extensions is also about to get even worse” And then: “All four of the other browsers use effectively the same APIs — Safari is potentially going to change that in some ugly ways” and To develop a Safari extension may eventually require Xcode” (emphasis mine). So it implies that Apple is forcing a switch to the Safari App Extension model, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. Both the traditional extension model and the new app extension model are supported side by side right now. While I agree that the review process is ridiculous, I think the author is disingenuous or uneducated on a few of the key points of the article.
- bangonkeyboard 10y ago
  No. > First, you can auto update extensions distributed via your own web server. It says so right in Apple’s docs how to do it: Only Safari extensions installed from the Safari Extensions Gallery can be updated automatically. [0] > So it implies that Apple is forcing a switch to the Safari App Extension model, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. The future of extensions development takes place in Xcode [1] As of Safari 10.0 on macOS 10.11.5, Safari extensions are created as app extensions in Xcode. New extensions are wrapped in a containing macOS app and are distributed and sold on the App Store. If you have created an extension with the methods described in this document, consider transitioning to the new extensions model. [2] > Both the traditional extension model and the new app extension model are supported side by side right now. http://i.imgur.com/tOGLKxb.png http://i.imgur.com/tOGLKxb.png --- [0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/DistributingYourExtension/DistributingYourExtension.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/safari/ https://developer.apple.com/safari/ [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To...
kitsunesoba 10y ago
I think Apple's general idea with this was to recruit extension developers into Apple platform development in some capacity, since paying that $100 also gets you access to the iOS and Mac app stores. It's probably not that unreasonable of a thought; any developer capable of creating a browser extension could also probably whip together some kind of electron/touchgap web app and publish it on iOS and/or macOS. Conversely, they may want existing iOS and Mac devs to be the ones creating Safari extensions rather than the current crop of multi-browser extension developers. This may be their way of trying to recreate the Mac's propensity to be a host to unique, platform-exclusive apps — in other words, they want Safari to have several prominent exclusives instead of just the same stuff you see everywhere else. Regardless of the motive I think it's safe to say that it isn't working out as they've planned.
droopyEyelids 10y ago
Hey HonestBleeps, I will gladly pay if you start charging. I'd pay in the neighborhood of $15 for Safari RES. Would love to pay for you to host my RES tags, too.

187 points by Lazare 10y ago

Having developed a safari extension for my mac app I have to agree. Compared to the app store process, safari extensions feel like an afterthought to Apple. For instance to update the app, you have to go to the submission page and resubmit your app, filling in all the details over again.

cpolis 10y ago

duplicate post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306964

NKCSS 10y ago

Biggest surprise: "Developers are paying $100 a year and Apple doesn’t even host the extension themselves."

bangonkeyboard 10y ago
They do, actually. Not that hosting a few dozen kilobytes makes it any better.

NKCSS 10y ago

Has Google dropped the requirement to pay for your Chrome Extention? I remember having to register and pay a fee to publish my Chrome extention [1] last year. From the article: "The $100 per year fee, which doesn’t have to be paid to publish to any other browser." [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nkcss-funda-images-downlo/bdhghkjaeodhaflkohpjfbidhbiincjc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nkcss-funda-images... [edit] Found it ([2]): "Before you publish your first app, you must pay a one-time $5 developer signup fee. A reminder in the dashboard will appear until you pay the fee." It's not $100, but I remembered having to pay 'something'. [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish#pay-the-developer-signup-fee https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish#pay-the-develo...

Flammy 10y ago
Pretty sure Google Chrome's dev fee is a $5 one time per account charge from when I was using it last year...
- londons_explore 10y ago
  It's basically an anti spam charge
danielsamuels 10y ago
Weird, I have several Chrome extensions published and I've never paid anything.
- _kyran 10y ago
  Older dev accounts did not have this fee.

Fnoord 10y ago

All this from one of the largest tax evaders in the world. Is this $100 per extension or $100 per developer? If the latter, make a non profit organisation as 3rd party who pays the fee and allow others to join it for free.

scarlac 10y ago
Per developer
- liaocs2008 10y ago
  I see... There must be a lot of people developing RES which would cost much.
  - BillinghamJ 10y ago
    No, it's per Apple developer account which will be publishing the extension. So RES only needs one. If the person who publishes RES also publishes others, that person still only needs one.
soneil 10y ago
The cost doesn't appear to be the actual problem. It's more a case of "adding insult to injury". The problem is basically one of jumping through hoops - but the hoops are poorly defined, poorly maintained, constantly moving and often nonsensical. Having to pay for the privilege is just the icing on the cake.
newscracker 10y ago
> All this from one of the largest tax evaders in the world. Where did you get that from? Or are you mixing up utilizing existing tax laws and legal loopholes with evasion? Or is it a reference to the EU tax ruling of $14 billion that's still in courts? Wikipedia says, "Tax evasion is the illegal evasion of taxes by individuals, corporations, and trusts."
johnnydoe9 10y ago
Ah, the Dallas Buyers Club. Apple will stomp on that shit hard though.

orf 10y ago

Just drop safari support. Vote with your feet, so to speak.

lol768 10y ago

> they will not auto update when you release new versions Wouldn't it be possible to do the auto-updating logic yourself? Is there something preventing this? I assume extensions can store stuff with localStorage, so what's to stop you downloading the code and eval'ing it?

sangnoir 10y ago
Out-of-band updates sound like a hole Apple would want to plug in the near future. The review process is entirely pointless when the the developer can bypass it via subsequent updates.

shakna 10y ago

So... This last year in Safari Extension world: * $100 buy in. Yearly. (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera... No license fees.) * Long, bug-prone, and somewhat idiotic review process. * No way to charge for an extension, to recoup that $100. So its ads or nothing. * Installation page only. No reviews. No real information. Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't automatically update the extension. What's coming in Safari Extension world: * The $100 fee is staying. * Xcode requirement. You'll need a Mac to publish. * Swift/Objective-C requirement. No more HTML/JS/CSS only. * Mac store listing, which means you can charge for extensions. But the Mac Store isn't known for a nice review process. * Hugely lacking documentation. Hopefully this'll change... But Apple doesn't have a good track record here. Result: Reddit Enhancement Suite has to decide between not publishing for one of the major browsers, or paying out for a longer, harder to maintain process, to achieve the same thing as they already do for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera. Personal anecdote: Apple seems to hate their own developers. This story, others, and my own experiences tell me that Apple makes everything more difficult than need be to put together a program, small or large, that actually runs on their platform. Swift was a step in the right direction, a nice language, a decent Open Source effort, and cross platform to boot. But Safari... Safari lacks in so many areas that it's progress on JS doesn't matter much. Isolating those who build for it is unhelpful. It almost seems like Apple want Safari to die.

bangonkeyboard 10y ago
> Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't automatically update the extension. There's a comment on the post disputing this possibility.
- shakna 10y ago
  True, I guess one could concievably build your own update mechanism. But that's even more overhead than what is necessary for all the other browsers, who let you use their stores and update mechanism for much less than $100/developer/year.
  - 10y ago

wouterinho 10y ago

We also had the same issues with (trying) to publish an extension to the Safari gallery: long waiting times, unclear communication, publishing without notification, etc. Besides that, the move towards the requirement of Xcode does not bode well for managing a multi-browser codebase in JS. Google and to a lesser extent Mozilla are doing way better on this and seem way more experienced in handling the extension ecosystem.

mrweasel 10y ago

I'm wondering if Apple decided to charge the $100 to have a "curated" set of extensions. There are thousand of extensions available for Firefox and Chrome, and most of them are junk. Maybe the thought that Apple had was that charging the $100 would leave them with a smaller set of extensions, with higher quality. I'm not really sure it's working, sure there's fewer extensions, but still a large number of weird ones.

dx034 10y ago
Reviews work much better for that than a $100 sign up fee.
paulgb 10y ago
If that's the intent, I think the effect will be opposite. The extensions they get will be the ones with the highest profit motive (ads, data collection, etc.) since they are the ones that can most easily overlook the $100 fee.

fowlerpower 10y ago

Apple is headed down the path that the old Microsoft was headed. Which they, Microsoft, have ironically backed away from. I guess what I'm saying is that in some ways Safari is the new IE, but without the same reach. The same kind of vendor lock in and shitty expensive tooling.

JohnTHaller 10y ago
Apple is worse in many ways. The situation with Safari on iOS with it being the only rendering engine you can use is akin to Microsoft forbidding other browsers on Windows and only allowing browser skin UIs that sit atop IE6.
- pier25 10y ago
  I've reported numerous iOS bugs in the webkit project and most of the times I never get answer. I also frequently report bugs in the Chromium project and I usually get an answer in less than an hour. Never a bug I reported was ignored, legitimate or not. Recently I wrote an article criticising iOS from a dev perspective and posted a tweet from a core webkit member: > that's because they have a lot more engineers and evangelists/dev-rel than Apple ...referring to Google and the Chromium project. Well, hours after I published the article the Twitter user was deleted. Here's the article in question: https://medium.com/@Pier/why-i-hate-ios-as-a-developer-459c182e8a72 https://medium.com/@Pier/why-i-hate-ios-as-a-developer-459c1...
wolfgke 10y ago
> Apple is headed down the path that the old Microsoft was headed. Exactly. > Which they, Microsoft, have ironically backed away from. Are you really sure that Microsoft backed away from this path? Just google about "Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions)" and inform yourself how Windows 10 uses/plans to use them. To help you a little bit for researching on this topic, here are two references: > https://sec.ch9.ms/slides/winHEC/03_WindowsSecurity.pdf https://sec.ch9.ms/slides/winHEC/03_WindowsSecurity.pdf > http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows%2010%20Fall%20Update.pdf http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows...

roryisok 10y ago

Another stupid decision by apple. Next they'll probably go after this party browsers, try and pull some stunt to force people to use Safari- some unique macos feature which only safari can access or something

clintonb 10y ago
They already have such a feature: Apple Pay can only be used in Safari for web payments.

vortico 10y ago

All this because many users prefer the Extension Gallery or are unable to install extensions manually. The only way to move away from centralized services is for users to stop using them. Unfortunately, the typical Safari user doesn't seem to me as the tech-savvy person willing to learn how to do this.

vfaronov 10y ago

> All four of the other browsers use effectively the same APIs — Safari is potentially going to change that in some ugly ways. I understand a developer’s desire to have more reach with less work. But if all browsers have the same APIs, for the same feature set, with the same UI... then what is the point of having different browsers? If Safari’s API changes lead to extensions that are better integrated with the underlying platform (and I don’t know if that is the case), I say all the power to them.

callahad 10y ago
Core APIs for common functions (intercept these network requests, inject these stylesheets, etc.) are being standardized so you don't have to reinvent the wheel on every damn browser. Browsers can also freely implement additional, non-standard add-on APIs that make sense for their product, while the APIs that aren't distinguishing features can get out of the way and Just Work, everywhere. For example, Opera has a sidebar API, while Chrome does not. This is good, and allows browsers to compete on privacy, performance, security, support for web standards, ui/ux, etc.

jsz0 10y ago

Just the other day I had a few Chrome extensions stop working and sure enough they're disabled because 'This extension contains malware'. Never had that problem with Safari so maybe the $100 isn't such a bad deal after all.

Insanity 10y ago
So you are saying that the exact same thing could not happen on the apple store or whatever it is called? Except then your extension would be disabled _AND_ you'd have lost $100

gurkendoktor 10y ago

Same experience here: Lots of confusing mails after my submission, needed to re-submit a few times, and never received a notification about my extension going live. I wouldn't have noticed the Safari Extensions menu item without watching WWDC videos, anyway. On the Mac App Store, besides copy-pasting some Swift/Objective-C, you also need to come up with a UI for your app. It'll probably be a storyboard with a single window that lets users know how to activate your extension, but getting the details right without prior experience in Cocoa development will eat some of your precious dev time.

yalogin 10y ago

What happens to your apps if you stop paying the annual fee? Will they be removed from the AppStore? Will there be no auto updates on them?

thenextman 10y ago

First, you can auto update extensions distributed via your own web server. It says so right in Apple’s docs how to do it: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/UpdatingExtensions/UpdatingExtensions.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009977-CH12-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To... Second, he writes: “Maintenance of Safari Extensions is also about to get even worse” And then: “All four of the other browsers use effectively the same APIs — Safari is potentially going to change that in some ugly ways” and To develop a Safari extension may eventually require Xcode” (emphasis mine). So it implies that Apple is forcing a switch to the Safari App Extension model, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. Both the traditional extension model and the new app extension model are supported side by side right now. While I agree that the review process is ridiculous, I think the author is disingenuous or uneducated on a few of the key points of the article.

bangonkeyboard 10y ago
No. > First, you can auto update extensions distributed via your own web server. It says so right in Apple’s docs how to do it: Only Safari extensions installed from the Safari Extensions Gallery can be updated automatically. [0] > So it implies that Apple is forcing a switch to the Safari App Extension model, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. The future of extensions development takes place in Xcode [1] As of Safari 10.0 on macOS 10.11.5, Safari extensions are created as app extensions in Xcode. New extensions are wrapped in a containing macOS app and are distributed and sold on the App Store. If you have created an extension with the methods described in this document, consider transitioning to the new extensions model. [2] > Both the traditional extension model and the new app extension model are supported side by side right now. http://i.imgur.com/tOGLKxb.png http://i.imgur.com/tOGLKxb.png --- [0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/DistributingYourExtension/DistributingYourExtension.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/safari/ https://developer.apple.com/safari/ [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To...

kitsunesoba 10y ago

I think Apple's general idea with this was to recruit extension developers into Apple platform development in some capacity, since paying that $100 also gets you access to the iOS and Mac app stores. It's probably not that unreasonable of a thought; any developer capable of creating a browser extension could also probably whip together some kind of electron/touchgap web app and publish it on iOS and/or macOS. Conversely, they may want existing iOS and Mac devs to be the ones creating Safari extensions rather than the current crop of multi-browser extension developers. This may be their way of trying to recreate the Mac's propensity to be a host to unique, platform-exclusive apps — in other words, they want Safari to have several prominent exclusives instead of just the same stuff you see everywhere else. Regardless of the motive I think it's safe to say that it isn't working out as they've planned.

droopyEyelids 10y ago

Hey HonestBleeps, I will gladly pay if you start charging. I'd pay in the neighborhood of $15 for Safari RES. Would love to pay for you to host my RES tags, too.