4 ms·

Maybe they could compete on having a better extension system. Chrome extensions are absolutely awful. Every single one I've ever used has had some kind of serio

Maybe they could compete on having a better extension system. Chrome extensions are absolutely awful. Every single one I've ever used has had some kind of serious bug, often deal breaking. I could easily fix many of them, but there is no method to do so. Let alone fork it or submit a pull request. You can't even load your own extensions, and you have to pay money to submit them to the web store. A scary percentage of them are sold to malware developers, and they silently update in the background. They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result. They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.

digi_owl 9y ago
Sadly Firefox is going the opposite way right now, because "security". But at the same time we have Vivaldi, a Chrome "fork", that seems to be gunning for just that. I swear there is a disease in the FOSS world these days, one carried by SJW busy bodies. Thing is that they are not in it to actually correct social ills, but personal aggrandizement. Thus what we get are shallow platitudes and economic sinkhole projects.
enra 9y ago
You can easily your own extensions in Chrome by clicking the "Load unpacked extension" which can be just a folder from your computer that has a manifest.json file in. You can also easily inspect the extensions that you have installed with the chrome developer tools, ie. copy them and fix them if needed. If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension. With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  I don't remember what the restriction was. I believe it only lets you have one third party extension at a time and auto disables it on startup. And I'm pretty sure you can't modify webstore ones, I haven't tried it though. I thought Firefox allowed third party extensions, have they changed that?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I would be surprised if they blocked third-party extensions since, last time I looked, Linux distributions were using these for their custom integration parts with Firefox.

digi_owl 9y ago

Sadly Firefox is going the opposite way right now, because "security". But at the same time we have Vivaldi, a Chrome "fork", that seems to be gunning for just that. I swear there is a disease in the FOSS world these days, one carried by SJW busy bodies. Thing is that they are not in it to actually correct social ills, but personal aggrandizement. Thus what we get are shallow platitudes and economic sinkhole projects.

enra 9y ago

You can easily your own extensions in Chrome by clicking the "Load unpacked extension" which can be just a folder from your computer that has a manifest.json file in. You can also easily inspect the extensions that you have installed with the chrome developer tools, ie. copy them and fix them if needed. If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension. With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.

Houshalter 9y ago
I don't remember what the restriction was. I believe it only lets you have one third party extension at a time and auto disables it on startup. And I'm pretty sure you can't modify webstore ones, I haven't tried it though. I thought Firefox allowed third party extensions, have they changed that?
- majewsky 9y ago
  I would be surprised if they blocked third-party extensions since, last time I looked, Linux distributions were using these for their custom integration parts with Firefox.