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Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

563 points by dessant 7y ago

iamnotacrook 7y ago
That's not their core business. It's redolent of the complaints when Twitter etc limit their API/number of tokens per app etc. They're doing it because it no longer serves a purpose. Perhaps Mozilla is slightly different but Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away.
- Zhenya 7y ago
  Google would benefit (maybe) only in the short term. If folks leave Chrome for browsers with adblock that would be a 1-2 punch. They'd loose their influence on the browser world and loose the ad revenue as well.
- eitland 7y ago
  > Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away. In the long run, this might sadly be true, but I disagree for now. No way Google is doing this because of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they haven't completely squeezed out all competitors yet. Removing or utterly crippling addons now would force users to realize what Chrome is while there still are options, meaning a huge chunk of the users would go to other browsers. Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't compete. Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized their users above quarterly / yearly profits. I used to be a huge fan but Google has massively disappointed me over the last 5-10 years.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    They pay the biggest and most popular adblock extension already long time ago to get their stuff whitelisted. Ublock is a niche thing.
  - rifung 7y ago
    I work for Google, opinions are my own. > Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized their users above quarterly / yearly profits. No need to apologize =] An example that comes to mind is the current focus on accessibility. I think from an objective financial/engineering perspective, it's much preferable to just ignore accessibility because it adds complexity and isn't used by the vast majority of users. However, providing access to everyone is the right thing to do. Another example is crisis tools (https://crisisresponse.google/ https://crisisresponse.google/). I don't think we make money from these apps. Of course, I'm sure people will say this is just for marketing or something but in the end, how can one get around that? I don't think Google is flawless. Far from it! But it's a huge company with way too many products so it's only natural there will be bad decisions and good ones, just as there are bad people as well as good people. > Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't compete. I'm not sure I understand.. are you saying that Chrome mobile takes up a lot of RAM? Because if so I would agree with that, but isn't that precisely why extensions shouldn't be allowed? Implementing extensions would add an even greater burden and poorly written extensions would provide a bad user experience. If anything I really wish we could strip Chrome down. I think people adopted Chrome early on because it was really light and personally I really feel like we let everyone down by letting it get so bloated.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      "they can force ram down the throat" here means "they can forcefully ram it down the throat"
    - SquareWheel 7y ago
      I'm curious. What specifically would you like to see removed from Chrome?
      - rifung 7y ago
        To be honest I don't know too much about what's been added but I can only assume new functionality must account for the increased bloat. I imagine it's support for things like "Chrome Apps" or more generally the desire to get websites to be able to do the same things as native apps. I suspect there's also the fact that Chrome has to support Chrome OS as well. But I am new to Chrome OS so admittedly I am not too familiar on the history or background =]
- frandroid 7y ago
  Their core business is to have a useful/featureful browser. Browsers gain extra features thanks to extensions. One of the reasons that keeps me with Firefox are many of its extensions. They almost lost me as a user when they deprecated a gazilion tons of extensions last year. I would say extensions are an integral part of the browser offering even if produced by third-parties.
- danShumway 7y ago
  It's pretty clearly in line with Mozilla's goals for an Open Internet -- and from a pragmatic point-of-view a mass exodus of extension developers from Chrome would be big problem for Google. I could see this as a way for Mozilla to further distinguish Firefox from Chrome. If Firefox was seen in the developer community as the platform to target if you want to make money, it won't take long for extension developers to start targeting Chrome only as an afterthought, and users would start to shift towards thinking of Firefox as "the one I can extend."
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    > an Open Internet I have no idea what this means, especially capitalized like a brand of some sort, so I don't know how supporting extension developers would help or hinder that. > users would start to shift towards thinking of Firefox as "the one I can extend." Users already thought of firefox as the browser you could extend, but mozilla decided that wasn't a priority. I don't see them suddenly reprioritizing that.
    - geofft 7y ago
      I think that's a bit unfair to Mozilla. They previously had prioritized extensibility over security, that is, extensions and plugins had basically direct access to the browser's C code itself. They've now prioritized security over extensibility. That's not to say that extensibility isn't a priority (or that security was previously not a priority).
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  > but Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away. That's a gross mischaracterization of the situation. There are far, far more extensions than just ad blockers. Google could trivially block ad blockers without killing all extensions, and ad blockers can survive just fine without extensions (pihole being the obvious example of one such alternative). Google even has their own rather large suite of extensions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/ext/15-by-google?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/ext/15-by-google... None of any of this has anything to do with ad blockers nor some hidden agenda to kill them. It's about how selling a hobby project can be disastrous for users, and what (if anything) Google/Mozilla should be doing to prevent those hobby developers from wanting to sell in the first place. Personally I think that's treating the symptom and not the cause, and a better policy would be something like Google or Mozilla preventing updates to extensions whose backing developer has changed. Although that would be hard to enforce.
oceanghost 7y ago
I know this is tangential-- I would like to write a FF extension -- can anyone point out some good resources for that? Beyond what's on Moz's official site of course.
- rococode 7y ago
  I just started working on an extension recently with no experience and have found it to be pleasantly unchallenging. If you are familiar with web development already, it's actually a pretty easy transition. Primarily you have the option of injecting some JS into every page, and also running a page in the background. So you just need to design your extension to work that way. Then you have access to some extension-specific APIs for stuff like the little icon in the toolbar or reading cookies. I think if you already know web dev, you probably don't need a specific resource to figure it out - just dive right into it and look up which parts of API you need for certain things. If you don't already know web dev, perhaps it would be better to learn that first and then look at extensions.
  - oceanghost 7y ago
    Thank you! I'm not a web dev precisely, but I think I can muddle through that :-)
    - jazoom 7y ago
      It's essentially the same as a Chrome extension now. Tutorials and documentation for either should work fine.
      - Scrantonicity 7y ago
        Extensions written for one should work in the other as well after some minor repackaging.
- askvictor 7y ago
  Since FF and Chrome use almost the same extension API, you can use Google resources to get started, and a lot of it will work on Firefox. The main exception is the identity module, which Chrome requires to be a Google account
Groxx 7y ago
Redesign reducing visibility of donation button, and no real support for selling / monetizing your extensions in the stores: totally agreed, they can and likely should do better there. I'd be curious to see if the change had any effect tho, and how much. Above-the-fold is valuable real-estate, it's possible that it's better-utilized after the change, just along a different set of priorities. Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from. Alexa can probably support it since more use of an Alexa likely has a strong correlation with increased purchases through Amazon - they essentially directly profit off popular extensions, in a measurable way because they track everything, since it keeps people using Amazon in general. I'm not sure Mozilla gets much money from e.g. adblock. Or other popular extensions. Plus they're a non-profit, so their cash-in-hand isn't too likely to change dramatically, unless we can convince more companies to donate (which could allow donating to extension devs).
- wmf 7y ago
  Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from. Web browsers are insanely profitable thanks to search referrals.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
taqcp 7y ago
Hey man, thanks for Buster. I donated. You deserve it.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Chrome and Google not caring or supporting these kind of things I get but Firefox's recent efforts seem to be either gross negligence or targeted moved to destroy their addon ecosystem. I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  I feel you. I absolutely think that Firefox needs to not follow Chrome's footsteps but instead continue to be the Emacs of the web versus being a gedit.
- Causality1 7y ago
  Been trending that way for years now. Making a browser that does what you want it to do is way easier than making a browser that does what your users want it to do. Sometimes I wonder if the "iterate version integers every six weeks so our e-peen looks bigger" approach is to blame.
  - stctw 7y ago
    That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other. Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web). And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first? Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.
asr 7y ago
On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox. BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions. That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.
- jhasse 7y ago
  > BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.
  - swozey 7y ago
    Dark Reader which is one of my must-haves has a known Firefox performance issue on a LOT of sites that makes Firefox almost unusable for me, so I recently begrudgingly switched back to Chrome. https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535 https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535
    - hnaccy 7y ago
      >Unfortunately Firefox is terribly slow in unpredictable places. I periodically try to find out what exactly makes it work slow in Firefox. For example this change improved twitter.com loading from ~30s to ~1s. His change[0] was changing array population from repeated concat to push. This is not an unpredictable hot spot but a developer not knowing his tools. Common sense is not premature optimization. [0] https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07fd4492575cd01da2ac1fef51cf6c?diff=split https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07...
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    For a demonstration install Dark Reader on an ageing or budget machine. It can render Chrome sluggish and frustrating and Firefox almost unusable. There's a fair few others that can upset Firefox but never seem to be the same extent of annoyance for Chrome.
pluc 7y ago
They're also failing users. The Chrome Web Store is a cesspool of malware and other abusive extensions - Mozilla is doing better though.
Causality1 7y ago
Personally I think this is sort of missing the forest for the trees. The big picture is, Mozilla and Google don't like extensions or extension developers. They don't like people customizing their browsers. We see feature after feature drop from being a button in the menu, to being an option in the about:config, to requiring an extension, to requiring manual modification of files, to being entirely disabled. Look at something as simple as putting the tabs below the address bar. If Mozilla respected their users, it would be as simple as hitting the Customize button and then dragging the tab bar to the bottom. Then they stuck it in an about:config option. Then they required you to make a custom userChrome.css. Now guess what, in the newest version userChrome.css loading is disabled by default and you have to manually turn it back on. How long it will take before it's entirely disabled? I have no idea, but the message from Mozilla is clear: "You can use it the way we want you to or you can go to hell".
bduerst 7y ago
>The Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store do not offer features for supporting extension developers. That doesn't seem right - doesn't Google let developers monetize extensions in the chrome web store? You can publish Hosted Apps, Chrome Apps, Chrome Extensions, and Themes in the Chrome Web Store. Collectively these are called simply "Items". You have many choices when it comes to making money from items that you publish in the Chrome Web Store. This page covers just a few ways to monetize your store item: - In-app payments - One-time charge - Subscription - Offering a limited trial version of your item https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money The issue of developers selling out their chrome extensions to 3P (that the author references) probably has more to do with the fact that bad actors get better money for harvesting user PII than the developer would if they maintained the extension as it was originally meant to be. This is a real privacy issue, but it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension.
- simon_weber 7y ago
  Google's Web Store payments system is terrible in my experience. I haven't been able to export accounting data for https://autoplaylists.simon.codes https://autoplaylists.simon.codes since April 2018: I spent almost a year badgering support so I could properly file my taxes. A letter from the New York AG got them to respond, but I still need to email them every time I need my data (they get an engineer to run a db query manually, from what I can tell). I did get an email today that they're migrating to a new system, so maybe it'll work in the future, but I wouldn't trust them based on what I've seen.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway5389 7y ago
  > it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension It'd be nice if they had 'trusted devs' or similar. Even if they provided a paid meatbag extension review service, I'd pay to get the plugins I use reviewed!
jordanmoconnor 7y ago
I make an extension for a living. Use Stripe and bake billing/account management into your app. Same experience across browsers.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I'm curious, is it just an extension or do you have other contact points with customers? I feel like it's hard to justify paying for an extension so I'd love to know how you convince people to pay.
haberdasher 7y ago
This speaks for itself: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1DSSRqLdH0h7790hPKiIHGlayLfhDGyEZWZLmxBQVNuSE4JFR3uj3fjRGY2lOK2J/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1... "Last updated: 3/12/2018"
throwaway5389 7y ago
I've experienced slowness / crashes with FF extensions, as some people have described here, annoyingly the problem doesn't seem to be reproducible. I'd optimally like to have 4-5 plugins maximum - key-driven browsing, adblock, CSS overrides and JavaScript injection. What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin? Because as soon as I add them all I experience 1-2 page crashes/infinity loops per hour
- throwawayy1001 7y ago
  > What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin? You don't do that if the plugin is provided for free, you can just say "thanks" or "no thanks", just don't use it / develop your own.
  - throwaway5389 7y ago
    I meant respectfully blame, fwiw. If your plugin crashes my browser and I like the plugin, I'll fix it / send a bug report. If I don't like it, or it's beyond repair, I'll uninstall it. I have way bigger stones I can grind my axe on, if I ever feel the need.
dessant 7y ago
Hi, author here. Certain software may bring greater value for society when it is freely accessible for everyone, without compromising on user privacy, while being partially subsidized by users who can afford to sponsor such projects. It would benefit us all if browser vendors would enable users to easily support extensions, and do so from a unified user interface, like an extension store. It sends a different signal for the user when a browser vendor encourages and handles contributions for extensions, instead of leaving developers on their own to build makeshift donation prompts and expect users to give out credit card data or sign up to third-party services just to donate. Sponsoring your favourite extensions right from your Google or Firefox account would help projects receive more funding, be more user-centered, and further enrich the browser extension ecosystem, while encouraging new developers to publish their own extensions and support user needs.
geofft 7y ago
> It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by the new owners. ... We are witnessing the failure of browser vendors to recognize the value of our labor and the important role it plays in a healthy browser ecosystem. So this is an interesting philosophical question - the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension. It's the market value of the trust of the extension's userbase. Is that the value of the extension developer's labor? I would argue not really. The value of a bank, for instance, is not the amount of money in all of the vaults. That money is held in trust for customers, and it is not for the owner of the bank to dispose of. Therefore, nobody who makes a fair offer for the bank should expect those resources in the transaction, so a fair market price for the bank is much less - such as the present value of the interest earned by the bank minus the interest returned to customers. In particular, the only reason the bank has customers is they expect to get their money back, generally with interest, at some point in the future. If they didn't, they'd put their money elsewhere. So if a bank is willing to sell the contents of the customer accounts, that indicates incomplete information in the market - customers didn't know the bank wasn't trustworthy. The true market value of the bank, in a perfect-information market, would be close to zero. It seems like the problem here is that we know two ways of compensating browser extension developers: "don't" and "breach your users' trust." Those point to wildly undervalued and wildly overvalued estimates of the fair market value of the developers' work. And we should come up with some fairer way to value their work (or, more fundamentally, to compensate them; we may not need to monetize the extension, necessarily) first, and I'm not totally sure it's the fault of browsers for not having had such a clever idea - it seems like we collectively need to figure that out.
- paulgb 7y ago
  As an extension developer who recently got one of these offers, your analysis is a good verbalization of my gut feeling on the matter. I turned it down, of course. While users may feel bad about extension developers not being compensated, I feel like the larger story here is that: - Companies are buying extensions for nefarious purposes, which presents a huge security risk. - Evidently, app stores are sufficiently bad at detecting this that it remains profitable.
mcjiggerlog 7y ago
They're also failing to support users, as hinted by the article. The fact that developers are able to simply hand over control of extensions to a third party, who are going to do god knows what with it, without the user being informed at all, is ridiculous. I have a few extensions with 10-100,000 users and have received many emails from people asking to buy one. The numbers in the article seem accurate - if you have 100,000 users you could be looking at offers for tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's no surprise that developers cave in and compromise their users' security.
gdulli 7y ago
Between every release making we worry what functionality I'm going to lose and which extensions will stop working, or having all my containers wiped out permanently, Mozilla is failing extension users.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
If it's open source then anyone can fork, right? So sell the extension, fork it, publish a new non-shitty version, and let users know via some non-official means. The only losers are the ignorant people who don't switch and the people you sold it to.
- pferde 7y ago
  Those ignorant people are your users too, and you're still being a dick by selling them out, no matter how you try to rationalize around it.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  I mean, this is what happened with MariaDB, and over the years more distros have outright replaced MySQL with MariaDB. He made a lot of money selling MySQL too. I don't condone this idea for browser plugins because the userbase for plugins are usually install and forget. I don't think most devs spend their time reading all the release notes of every plugin they install. When you install a database server / engine, you take time to figure out if it's the one you want or not. You research the company and other companies using the product.
thomas 7y ago
No way anyone google or Mozilla can compete with a potential sale of 30 cents a user. So if that’s truly they case they might was well expect the sales to happen and start to limit the power of extensions or put them behind expert-only gates, like Chrome flags.
- dessant 7y ago
  Obviously none of us expect to be paid the black market value of extensions. The point is for browser vendors to offer better tools for sponsoring developers, because it benefits everyone. And no, the reaction to security issues should not be to further limit the extension API and declare war on the concept of general computing.
SimeVidas 7y ago
Idea: 1. The browser introduces a flat monthly subscription, e.g., $5 per month. 2. If the user signs up, the browser would distribute the money between the extensions that the user has installed, by default. 3. The user would also have the option to direct the money to specific extensions and/or to exclude specific extensions from this payment. 4. This system would be completely optional, but the browser cold in return provide an advanced extensions UI with extra privacy and security options.
- techntoke 7y ago
  A flat monthly subscription for what exactly? Advanced extensions with UI and extra privacy/security options? There is a reason why this doesn't exist, and people already pay extra money for Windows and Mac OS. If people are already paying for an OS, they shouldn't then be required to pay for a premier browsing experience.
zzzcpan 7y ago
A lot of extensions are made because people need them for themselves, not to live of extension development. And this is something that can exist as a nice open source ecosystem with some oversight, like packages on a typical linux distro. All the development stuff can go into something like AUR on Archlinux, where users have to explicitly participate and accept more risk. And this is something not very evil browser vendor might be willing and be able to do. But creating incentives for extension developers is definitely the opposite of their plans, they'd rather kill extensions altogether.
vfclists 7y ago
Why don't developers of addons like gorhill and piro accept donations and hand them out to other addon developers they consider worthy, or some other developers users consider worthy? It will help addon developers or even bring new developers to support addons whose original developers want to move on to other things.
Razengan 7y ago
Despite having a smaller extension ecosystem, Apple seems to have the right idea: Safari extensions (and soon even system extensions) are discovered and delivered via the App Store like any other app, and their developers can charge for them like any other app.
OrgNet 7y ago
Sometime I think that Google is controlling the decisions at Mozilla for Firefox...
ww520 7y ago
I wrote browser extensions in pastime. They are mainly for my needs and happen to be useful for others. I'm lucky that I don't need to write extensions for financial reason, and don't ever plan to sell out. On the other hand, I can understand why some developers choose to do so. People get a family to feed. It would certainly helpful for Google and Mozilla to have greater support for the extension developers financially.
pjmlp 7y ago
Maybe it is me, but I seldom see the value of using an extension versus little utilities. It is not as if every mainstream language doesn't have libraries to handle networking requests.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  I wrote a security focused javascript, ad and annoyance blocking extension for myself, which is essentially a CSP, script and style injector with keyboard shortcuts. I don't see how utilities can help here.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It would have been done via proxy configuration.
    - zzzcpan 7y ago
      Sure, it's technically possible, but it's an order of magnitude more work.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Which prevents any extension author free reign on my browser data.
Santosh83 7y ago
The basic issue is people do not want to pay for software if a 'good enough' free replacement is available. Hence Mozilla having to source money from whomever is willing to give them, and hence the race to the bottom. This has been particularly true in browser space. We usually pay for using programs of similar complexity like PS or AutoCAD etc., but we have always taken it for granted that browsers should be free and/or bundled. This works to the advantage of big players who can sink in the millions involved, which Mozilla is only alive today because of former momentum (user base). Forget about a browser startup or a community-maintained alternative. It has become too huge and complex an undertaking for anyone to bother as long as Chrome/Edge/Safari/Firefox will be available, no matter if they turn into user-hostile mess.
keraf 7y ago
NoCoin author here. With approx 700k users across 3 browsers, I have obviously received many emails for purchasing my extension. I have never accepted to sell my project, even when I had some low financial moments, because my intent was never to make money with it. And it being an open source project, it belongs to the community. I would also feel like I am breaching the trust of my users if I decide to hand it over to an unknown party. I always look up at the exemplar integrity of VLC maintainer @jbk [0]. Regarding the monetization of NoCoin, I advertise the fact that I am accepting donations in the description of the extension and have links on the GitHub page. There is also a button to donate directly on the Firefox add-ons page. Almost all donations came from the Firefox Add-ons store. I guess if Google would do the same on the Chrome store, developers would get more donations? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048
- elorant 7y ago
  If I'm not too intrusive, what's the average offer an extension like yours receives for selling it?
  - gildas 7y ago
    I publish an extension on the store of Chrome with 1+ million of (technical) users. Three years ago, someone proposed me to buy it for 50,000 USD. He clearly indicated that he was interested by the user base...
  - callumlocke 7y ago
    I’m the author of JSON Formatter [1] with 989,000 users. I probably get a couple of offers a year for it. Of those that have offered specific sums, they ranged from from $10-20k. I always reject them, because it’s pretty obvious they want to turn it into malware. I’ve had a couple of cases where I felt they went to some effort to schmooze me first, presenting themselves as having benign intentions, almost like a carefully crafted con. But as far as I can tell, there is no legitimate, ethical reason to want to acquire it, and I won’t sell out my users like that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcjindcccaagfpapjjmafapmmgkkhgoa?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj...
billpg 7y ago
I don't use browser extensions (as much as I'd like to) because I've seen too many being sold for nefarious purposes.
pluma 7y ago
I think what a lot of comments are missing is that the value of a browser is directly boosted by the value provided by its extensions. I wouldn't have switched to Firefox from Chrome if most of the extensions I was using wouldn't have had readily available equivalents or workarounds. I would have held off on test-driving the new Edge as my daily workhorse browser if I hadn't noticed an extension for my password manager in the Microsoft Store and found that I can install most extensions from the Chrome Web Store too. Netscape and Opera prove that the paid browser business model is dead, sure, but that doesn't mean browsers (especially browsers developed by companies with lots of related paid services) don't represent value for the companies developing them -- and that those companies don't profit from that value. Google especially benefits massively from Chrome's marketshare -- even to the extent that their own web services can get away with treating competitor browsers as second-class citizens. Extension developers contribute to the value driving that marketshare and open source extension developers do so with practically no return on investment. This is just another example of the true sharing economy of open source clashing with capitalism (which is inherently based on extracting surplus value as profit, not sharing it back). Which would be fine, really, if the people participating in the sharing economy wouldn't also exist in capitalism and have to rely on their success under capitalism to ensure basic subsistence like food, shelter and the means of extension development. Extension developers using ads, tracking, malware or selling their extensions to malicious entities are just trying to find ways within the system to capitalise at least on some of the value they've provided. That's undesirable and developers shouldn't be in such dire circumstances to be willing to give in, but this is a systemic problem. Luckily unlike with most systems, this system is almost entirely in the hands of browser vendors. Browser vendors could emphasize donation options -- just look at how big open source projects like some Linux distros push donations while still allowing for freeloading. But browser vendors currently have no direct incentive to do so -- in fact, doing so might actually harm their metrics.
timwaagh 7y ago
I don't think devs should be shamed into not selling their software. That's some questionable 'white-knight' ethics. If you sell something, great. if you don't, also great. if you use ads to monetize or sell data, also great. If you use a freemium model which serves ads to the plebs and asks money from the elite, even better. For that matter I don't think open browser producers can be expected to foot the bill for it either. their browsers do not cost a thing, after all and browser extensions only impact a very small part of their userbase. Please remember that not everyone has a problem with ads, 'privacy invasion' and targetting. Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this mentality rather stifling.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  > Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this mentality rather stifling. I feel like people should be more informed over the implications. If they still don't care once I explain the issues, that's their prerogative to not care. I feel like most people don't understand why the "I have nothing to hide" mentality will cost us plenty of freedoms we still have. I agree with you though, most people aren't like the majority of HN users, they just don't care or don't understand.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > browser extensions only impact a very small part of their userbase Third or even half of the userbase is not a small part. > Please remember that not everyone has a problem with ads, 'privacy invasion' and targetting. Everyone has a problem with this once they understand what's going on and how it can be used against them. It's just most people are not software engineers and security, privacy related issues are hard for them to understand.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Your really selling your position here by using terms such as "plebs" and elite"
Ambele 7y ago
If you aren't buying the product, then you are the product. Maybe the problem is that extensions stores aren't as monitized as the IOS and Android App stores?

563 points by dessant 7y ago

That's not their core business. It's redolent of the complaints when Twitter etc limit their API/number of tokens per app etc. They're doing it because it no longer serves a purpose. Perhaps Mozilla is slightly different but Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away.

Zhenya 7y ago
Google would benefit (maybe) only in the short term. If folks leave Chrome for browsers with adblock that would be a 1-2 punch. They'd loose their influence on the browser world and loose the ad revenue as well.
eitland 7y ago
> Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away. In the long run, this might sadly be true, but I disagree for now. No way Google is doing this because of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they haven't completely squeezed out all competitors yet. Removing or utterly crippling addons now would force users to realize what Chrome is while there still are options, meaning a huge chunk of the users would go to other browsers. Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't compete. Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized their users above quarterly / yearly profits. I used to be a huge fan but Google has massively disappointed me over the last 5-10 years.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  They pay the biggest and most popular adblock extension already long time ago to get their stuff whitelisted. Ublock is a niche thing.
- rifung 7y ago
  I work for Google, opinions are my own. > Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized their users above quarterly / yearly profits. No need to apologize =] An example that comes to mind is the current focus on accessibility. I think from an objective financial/engineering perspective, it's much preferable to just ignore accessibility because it adds complexity and isn't used by the vast majority of users. However, providing access to everyone is the right thing to do. Another example is crisis tools (https://crisisresponse.google/ https://crisisresponse.google/). I don't think we make money from these apps. Of course, I'm sure people will say this is just for marketing or something but in the end, how can one get around that? I don't think Google is flawless. Far from it! But it's a huge company with way too many products so it's only natural there will be bad decisions and good ones, just as there are bad people as well as good people. > Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't compete. I'm not sure I understand.. are you saying that Chrome mobile takes up a lot of RAM? Because if so I would agree with that, but isn't that precisely why extensions shouldn't be allowed? Implementing extensions would add an even greater burden and poorly written extensions would provide a bad user experience. If anything I really wish we could strip Chrome down. I think people adopted Chrome early on because it was really light and personally I really feel like we let everyone down by letting it get so bloated.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    "they can force ram down the throat" here means "they can forcefully ram it down the throat"
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    I'm curious. What specifically would you like to see removed from Chrome?
    - rifung 7y ago
      To be honest I don't know too much about what's been added but I can only assume new functionality must account for the increased bloat. I imagine it's support for things like "Chrome Apps" or more generally the desire to get websites to be able to do the same things as native apps. I suspect there's also the fact that Chrome has to support Chrome OS as well. But I am new to Chrome OS so admittedly I am not too familiar on the history or background =]
frandroid 7y ago
Their core business is to have a useful/featureful browser. Browsers gain extra features thanks to extensions. One of the reasons that keeps me with Firefox are many of its extensions. They almost lost me as a user when they deprecated a gazilion tons of extensions last year. I would say extensions are an integral part of the browser offering even if produced by third-parties.
danShumway 7y ago
It's pretty clearly in line with Mozilla's goals for an Open Internet -- and from a pragmatic point-of-view a mass exodus of extension developers from Chrome would be big problem for Google. I could see this as a way for Mozilla to further distinguish Firefox from Chrome. If Firefox was seen in the developer community as the platform to target if you want to make money, it won't take long for extension developers to start targeting Chrome only as an afterthought, and users would start to shift towards thinking of Firefox as "the one I can extend."
- pessimizer 7y ago
  > an Open Internet I have no idea what this means, especially capitalized like a brand of some sort, so I don't know how supporting extension developers would help or hinder that. > users would start to shift towards thinking of Firefox as "the one I can extend." Users already thought of firefox as the browser you could extend, but mozilla decided that wasn't a priority. I don't see them suddenly reprioritizing that.
  - geofft 7y ago
    I think that's a bit unfair to Mozilla. They previously had prioritized extensibility over security, that is, extensions and plugins had basically direct access to the browser's C code itself. They've now prioritized security over extensibility. That's not to say that extensibility isn't a priority (or that security was previously not a priority).
kllrnohj 7y ago
> but Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away. That's a gross mischaracterization of the situation. There are far, far more extensions than just ad blockers. Google could trivially block ad blockers without killing all extensions, and ad blockers can survive just fine without extensions (pihole being the obvious example of one such alternative). Google even has their own rather large suite of extensions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/ext/15-by-google?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/ext/15-by-google... None of any of this has anything to do with ad blockers nor some hidden agenda to kill them. It's about how selling a hobby project can be disastrous for users, and what (if anything) Google/Mozilla should be doing to prevent those hobby developers from wanting to sell in the first place. Personally I think that's treating the symptom and not the cause, and a better policy would be something like Google or Mozilla preventing updates to extensions whose backing developer has changed. Although that would be hard to enforce.

oceanghost 7y ago

I know this is tangential-- I would like to write a FF extension -- can anyone point out some good resources for that? Beyond what's on Moz's official site of course.

rococode 7y ago
I just started working on an extension recently with no experience and have found it to be pleasantly unchallenging. If you are familiar with web development already, it's actually a pretty easy transition. Primarily you have the option of injecting some JS into every page, and also running a page in the background. So you just need to design your extension to work that way. Then you have access to some extension-specific APIs for stuff like the little icon in the toolbar or reading cookies. I think if you already know web dev, you probably don't need a specific resource to figure it out - just dive right into it and look up which parts of API you need for certain things. If you don't already know web dev, perhaps it would be better to learn that first and then look at extensions.
- oceanghost 7y ago
  Thank you! I'm not a web dev precisely, but I think I can muddle through that :-)
  - jazoom 7y ago
    It's essentially the same as a Chrome extension now. Tutorials and documentation for either should work fine.
    - Scrantonicity 7y ago
      Extensions written for one should work in the other as well after some minor repackaging.
askvictor 7y ago
Since FF and Chrome use almost the same extension API, you can use Google resources to get started, and a lot of it will work on Firefox. The main exception is the identity module, which Chrome requires to be a Google account

Groxx 7y ago

Redesign reducing visibility of donation button, and no real support for selling / monetizing your extensions in the stores: totally agreed, they can and likely should do better there. I'd be curious to see if the change had any effect tho, and how much. Above-the-fold is valuable real-estate, it's possible that it's better-utilized after the change, just along a different set of priorities. Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from. Alexa can probably support it since more use of an Alexa likely has a strong correlation with increased purchases through Amazon - they essentially directly profit off popular extensions, in a measurable way because they track everything, since it keeps people using Amazon in general. I'm not sure Mozilla gets much money from e.g. adblock. Or other popular extensions. Plus they're a non-profit, so their cash-in-hand isn't too likely to change dramatically, unless we can convince more companies to donate (which could allow donating to extension devs).

wmf 7y ago
Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from. Web browsers are insanely profitable thanks to search referrals.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

taqcp 7y ago

Hey man, thanks for Buster. I donated. You deserve it.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

Chrome and Google not caring or supporting these kind of things I get but Firefox's recent efforts seem to be either gross negligence or targeted moved to destroy their addon ecosystem. I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.

ignoramous 7y ago
I feel you. I absolutely think that Firefox needs to not follow Chrome's footsteps but instead continue to be the Emacs of the web versus being a gedit.
Causality1 7y ago
Been trending that way for years now. Making a browser that does what you want it to do is way easier than making a browser that does what your users want it to do. Sometimes I wonder if the "iterate version integers every six weeks so our e-peen looks bigger" approach is to blame.
- stctw 7y ago
  That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other. Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web). And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first? Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.

asr 7y ago

On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox. BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions. That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.

jhasse 7y ago
> BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.
- swozey 7y ago
  Dark Reader which is one of my must-haves has a known Firefox performance issue on a LOT of sites that makes Firefox almost unusable for me, so I recently begrudgingly switched back to Chrome. https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535 https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    >Unfortunately Firefox is terribly slow in unpredictable places. I periodically try to find out what exactly makes it work slow in Firefox. For example this change improved twitter.com loading from ~30s to ~1s. His change[0] was changing array population from repeated concat to push. This is not an unpredictable hot spot but a developer not knowing his tools. Common sense is not premature optimization. [0] https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07fd4492575cd01da2ac1fef51cf6c?diff=split https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  For a demonstration install Dark Reader on an ageing or budget machine. It can render Chrome sluggish and frustrating and Firefox almost unusable. There's a fair few others that can upset Firefox but never seem to be the same extent of annoyance for Chrome.

pluc 7y ago

They're also failing users. The Chrome Web Store is a cesspool of malware and other abusive extensions - Mozilla is doing better though.

Causality1 7y ago

Personally I think this is sort of missing the forest for the trees. The big picture is, Mozilla and Google don't like extensions or extension developers. They don't like people customizing their browsers. We see feature after feature drop from being a button in the menu, to being an option in the about:config, to requiring an extension, to requiring manual modification of files, to being entirely disabled. Look at something as simple as putting the tabs below the address bar. If Mozilla respected their users, it would be as simple as hitting the Customize button and then dragging the tab bar to the bottom. Then they stuck it in an about:config option. Then they required you to make a custom userChrome.css. Now guess what, in the newest version userChrome.css loading is disabled by default and you have to manually turn it back on. How long it will take before it's entirely disabled? I have no idea, but the message from Mozilla is clear: "You can use it the way we want you to or you can go to hell".

bduerst 7y ago

>The Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store do not offer features for supporting extension developers. That doesn't seem right - doesn't Google let developers monetize extensions in the chrome web store? You can publish Hosted Apps, Chrome Apps, Chrome Extensions, and Themes in the Chrome Web Store. Collectively these are called simply "Items". You have many choices when it comes to making money from items that you publish in the Chrome Web Store. This page covers just a few ways to monetize your store item: - In-app payments - One-time charge - Subscription - Offering a limited trial version of your item https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money The issue of developers selling out their chrome extensions to 3P (that the author references) probably has more to do with the fact that bad actors get better money for harvesting user PII than the developer would if they maintained the extension as it was originally meant to be. This is a real privacy issue, but it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension.

simon_weber 7y ago
Google's Web Store payments system is terrible in my experience. I haven't been able to export accounting data for https://autoplaylists.simon.codes https://autoplaylists.simon.codes since April 2018: I spent almost a year badgering support so I could properly file my taxes. A letter from the New York AG got them to respond, but I still need to email them every time I need my data (they get an engineer to run a db query manually, from what I can tell). I did get an email today that they're migrating to a new system, so maybe it'll work in the future, but I wouldn't trust them based on what I've seen.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throwaway5389 7y ago
> it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension It'd be nice if they had 'trusted devs' or similar. Even if they provided a paid meatbag extension review service, I'd pay to get the plugins I use reviewed!

jordanmoconnor 7y ago

I make an extension for a living. Use Stripe and bake billing/account management into your app. Same experience across browsers.

cameronbrown 7y ago
I'm curious, is it just an extension or do you have other contact points with customers? I feel like it's hard to justify paying for an extension so I'd love to know how you convince people to pay.

haberdasher 7y ago

This speaks for itself: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1DSSRqLdH0h7790hPKiIHGlayLfhDGyEZWZLmxBQVNuSE4JFR3uj3fjRGY2lOK2J/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1... "Last updated: 3/12/2018"

throwaway5389 7y ago

I've experienced slowness / crashes with FF extensions, as some people have described here, annoyingly the problem doesn't seem to be reproducible. I'd optimally like to have 4-5 plugins maximum - key-driven browsing, adblock, CSS overrides and JavaScript injection. What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin? Because as soon as I add them all I experience 1-2 page crashes/infinity loops per hour

throwawayy1001 7y ago
> What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin? You don't do that if the plugin is provided for free, you can just say "thanks" or "no thanks", just don't use it / develop your own.
- throwaway5389 7y ago
  I meant respectfully blame, fwiw. If your plugin crashes my browser and I like the plugin, I'll fix it / send a bug report. If I don't like it, or it's beyond repair, I'll uninstall it. I have way bigger stones I can grind my axe on, if I ever feel the need.

dessant 7y ago

Hi, author here. Certain software may bring greater value for society when it is freely accessible for everyone, without compromising on user privacy, while being partially subsidized by users who can afford to sponsor such projects. It would benefit us all if browser vendors would enable users to easily support extensions, and do so from a unified user interface, like an extension store. It sends a different signal for the user when a browser vendor encourages and handles contributions for extensions, instead of leaving developers on their own to build makeshift donation prompts and expect users to give out credit card data or sign up to third-party services just to donate. Sponsoring your favourite extensions right from your Google or Firefox account would help projects receive more funding, be more user-centered, and further enrich the browser extension ecosystem, while encouraging new developers to publish their own extensions and support user needs.

geofft 7y ago

> It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by the new owners. ... We are witnessing the failure of browser vendors to recognize the value of our labor and the important role it plays in a healthy browser ecosystem. So this is an interesting philosophical question - the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension. It's the market value of the trust of the extension's userbase. Is that the value of the extension developer's labor? I would argue not really. The value of a bank, for instance, is not the amount of money in all of the vaults. That money is held in trust for customers, and it is not for the owner of the bank to dispose of. Therefore, nobody who makes a fair offer for the bank should expect those resources in the transaction, so a fair market price for the bank is much less - such as the present value of the interest earned by the bank minus the interest returned to customers. In particular, the only reason the bank has customers is they expect to get their money back, generally with interest, at some point in the future. If they didn't, they'd put their money elsewhere. So if a bank is willing to sell the contents of the customer accounts, that indicates incomplete information in the market - customers didn't know the bank wasn't trustworthy. The true market value of the bank, in a perfect-information market, would be close to zero. It seems like the problem here is that we know two ways of compensating browser extension developers: "don't" and "breach your users' trust." Those point to wildly undervalued and wildly overvalued estimates of the fair market value of the developers' work. And we should come up with some fairer way to value their work (or, more fundamentally, to compensate them; we may not need to monetize the extension, necessarily) first, and I'm not totally sure it's the fault of browsers for not having had such a clever idea - it seems like we collectively need to figure that out.

paulgb 7y ago
As an extension developer who recently got one of these offers, your analysis is a good verbalization of my gut feeling on the matter. I turned it down, of course. While users may feel bad about extension developers not being compensated, I feel like the larger story here is that: - Companies are buying extensions for nefarious purposes, which presents a huge security risk. - Evidently, app stores are sufficiently bad at detecting this that it remains profitable.

mcjiggerlog 7y ago

They're also failing to support users, as hinted by the article. The fact that developers are able to simply hand over control of extensions to a third party, who are going to do god knows what with it, without the user being informed at all, is ridiculous. I have a few extensions with 10-100,000 users and have received many emails from people asking to buy one. The numbers in the article seem accurate - if you have 100,000 users you could be looking at offers for tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's no surprise that developers cave in and compromise their users' security.

gdulli 7y ago

Between every release making we worry what functionality I'm going to lose and which extensions will stop working, or having all my containers wiped out permanently, Mozilla is failing extension users.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

If it's open source then anyone can fork, right? So sell the extension, fork it, publish a new non-shitty version, and let users know via some non-official means. The only losers are the ignorant people who don't switch and the people you sold it to.

pferde 7y ago
Those ignorant people are your users too, and you're still being a dick by selling them out, no matter how you try to rationalize around it.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
I mean, this is what happened with MariaDB, and over the years more distros have outright replaced MySQL with MariaDB. He made a lot of money selling MySQL too. I don't condone this idea for browser plugins because the userbase for plugins are usually install and forget. I don't think most devs spend their time reading all the release notes of every plugin they install. When you install a database server / engine, you take time to figure out if it's the one you want or not. You research the company and other companies using the product.

thomas 7y ago

No way anyone google or Mozilla can compete with a potential sale of 30 cents a user. So if that’s truly they case they might was well expect the sales to happen and start to limit the power of extensions or put them behind expert-only gates, like Chrome flags.

dessant 7y ago
Obviously none of us expect to be paid the black market value of extensions. The point is for browser vendors to offer better tools for sponsoring developers, because it benefits everyone. And no, the reaction to security issues should not be to further limit the extension API and declare war on the concept of general computing.

SimeVidas 7y ago

Idea: 1. The browser introduces a flat monthly subscription, e.g., $5 per month. 2. If the user signs up, the browser would distribute the money between the extensions that the user has installed, by default. 3. The user would also have the option to direct the money to specific extensions and/or to exclude specific extensions from this payment. 4. This system would be completely optional, but the browser cold in return provide an advanced extensions UI with extra privacy and security options.

techntoke 7y ago
A flat monthly subscription for what exactly? Advanced extensions with UI and extra privacy/security options? There is a reason why this doesn't exist, and people already pay extra money for Windows and Mac OS. If people are already paying for an OS, they shouldn't then be required to pay for a premier browsing experience.

zzzcpan 7y ago

A lot of extensions are made because people need them for themselves, not to live of extension development. And this is something that can exist as a nice open source ecosystem with some oversight, like packages on a typical linux distro. All the development stuff can go into something like AUR on Archlinux, where users have to explicitly participate and accept more risk. And this is something not very evil browser vendor might be willing and be able to do. But creating incentives for extension developers is definitely the opposite of their plans, they'd rather kill extensions altogether.

vfclists 7y ago

Why don't developers of addons like gorhill and piro accept donations and hand them out to other addon developers they consider worthy, or some other developers users consider worthy? It will help addon developers or even bring new developers to support addons whose original developers want to move on to other things.

Razengan 7y ago

Despite having a smaller extension ecosystem, Apple seems to have the right idea: Safari extensions (and soon even system extensions) are discovered and delivered via the App Store like any other app, and their developers can charge for them like any other app.

OrgNet 7y ago

Sometime I think that Google is controlling the decisions at Mozilla for Firefox...

ww520 7y ago

I wrote browser extensions in pastime. They are mainly for my needs and happen to be useful for others. I'm lucky that I don't need to write extensions for financial reason, and don't ever plan to sell out. On the other hand, I can understand why some developers choose to do so. People get a family to feed. It would certainly helpful for Google and Mozilla to have greater support for the extension developers financially.

pjmlp 7y ago

Maybe it is me, but I seldom see the value of using an extension versus little utilities. It is not as if every mainstream language doesn't have libraries to handle networking requests.

zzzcpan 7y ago
I wrote a security focused javascript, ad and annoyance blocking extension for myself, which is essentially a CSP, script and style injector with keyboard shortcuts. I don't see how utilities can help here.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It would have been done via proxy configuration.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    Sure, it's technically possible, but it's an order of magnitude more work.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Which prevents any extension author free reign on my browser data.

Santosh83 7y ago

The basic issue is people do not want to pay for software if a 'good enough' free replacement is available. Hence Mozilla having to source money from whomever is willing to give them, and hence the race to the bottom. This has been particularly true in browser space. We usually pay for using programs of similar complexity like PS or AutoCAD etc., but we have always taken it for granted that browsers should be free and/or bundled. This works to the advantage of big players who can sink in the millions involved, which Mozilla is only alive today because of former momentum (user base). Forget about a browser startup or a community-maintained alternative. It has become too huge and complex an undertaking for anyone to bother as long as Chrome/Edge/Safari/Firefox will be available, no matter if they turn into user-hostile mess.

keraf 7y ago

NoCoin author here. With approx 700k users across 3 browsers, I have obviously received many emails for purchasing my extension. I have never accepted to sell my project, even when I had some low financial moments, because my intent was never to make money with it. And it being an open source project, it belongs to the community. I would also feel like I am breaching the trust of my users if I decide to hand it over to an unknown party. I always look up at the exemplar integrity of VLC maintainer @jbk [0]. Regarding the monetization of NoCoin, I advertise the fact that I am accepting donations in the description of the extension and have links on the GitHub page. There is also a button to donate directly on the Firefox add-ons page. Almost all donations came from the Firefox Add-ons store. I guess if Google would do the same on the Chrome store, developers would get more donations? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

elorant 7y ago
If I'm not too intrusive, what's the average offer an extension like yours receives for selling it?
- gildas 7y ago
  I publish an extension on the store of Chrome with 1+ million of (technical) users. Three years ago, someone proposed me to buy it for 50,000 USD. He clearly indicated that he was interested by the user base...
- callumlocke 7y ago
  I’m the author of JSON Formatter [1] with 989,000 users. I probably get a couple of offers a year for it. Of those that have offered specific sums, they ranged from from $10-20k. I always reject them, because it’s pretty obvious they want to turn it into malware. I’ve had a couple of cases where I felt they went to some effort to schmooze me first, presenting themselves as having benign intentions, almost like a carefully crafted con. But as far as I can tell, there is no legitimate, ethical reason to want to acquire it, and I won’t sell out my users like that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcjindcccaagfpapjjmafapmmgkkhgoa?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj...

billpg 7y ago

I don't use browser extensions (as much as I'd like to) because I've seen too many being sold for nefarious purposes.

pluma 7y ago

I think what a lot of comments are missing is that the value of a browser is directly boosted by the value provided by its extensions. I wouldn't have switched to Firefox from Chrome if most of the extensions I was using wouldn't have had readily available equivalents or workarounds. I would have held off on test-driving the new Edge as my daily workhorse browser if I hadn't noticed an extension for my password manager in the Microsoft Store and found that I can install most extensions from the Chrome Web Store too. Netscape and Opera prove that the paid browser business model is dead, sure, but that doesn't mean browsers (especially browsers developed by companies with lots of related paid services) don't represent value for the companies developing them -- and that those companies don't profit from that value. Google especially benefits massively from Chrome's marketshare -- even to the extent that their own web services can get away with treating competitor browsers as second-class citizens. Extension developers contribute to the value driving that marketshare and open source extension developers do so with practically no return on investment. This is just another example of the true sharing economy of open source clashing with capitalism (which is inherently based on extracting surplus value as profit, not sharing it back). Which would be fine, really, if the people participating in the sharing economy wouldn't also exist in capitalism and have to rely on their success under capitalism to ensure basic subsistence like food, shelter and the means of extension development. Extension developers using ads, tracking, malware or selling their extensions to malicious entities are just trying to find ways within the system to capitalise at least on some of the value they've provided. That's undesirable and developers shouldn't be in such dire circumstances to be willing to give in, but this is a systemic problem. Luckily unlike with most systems, this system is almost entirely in the hands of browser vendors. Browser vendors could emphasize donation options -- just look at how big open source projects like some Linux distros push donations while still allowing for freeloading. But browser vendors currently have no direct incentive to do so -- in fact, doing so might actually harm their metrics.

timwaagh 7y ago

I don't think devs should be shamed into not selling their software. That's some questionable 'white-knight' ethics. If you sell something, great. if you don't, also great. if you use ads to monetize or sell data, also great. If you use a freemium model which serves ads to the plebs and asks money from the elite, even better. For that matter I don't think open browser producers can be expected to foot the bill for it either. their browsers do not cost a thing, after all and browser extensions only impact a very small part of their userbase. Please remember that not everyone has a problem with ads, 'privacy invasion' and targetting. Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this mentality rather stifling.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
> Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this mentality rather stifling. I feel like people should be more informed over the implications. If they still don't care once I explain the issues, that's their prerogative to not care. I feel like most people don't understand why the "I have nothing to hide" mentality will cost us plenty of freedoms we still have. I agree with you though, most people aren't like the majority of HN users, they just don't care or don't understand.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> browser extensions only impact a very small part of their userbase Third or even half of the userbase is not a small part. > Please remember that not everyone has a problem with ads, 'privacy invasion' and targetting. Everyone has a problem with this once they understand what's going on and how it can be used against them. It's just most people are not software engineers and security, privacy related issues are hard for them to understand.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Your really selling your position here by using terms such as "plebs" and elite"

Ambele 7y ago

If you aren't buying the product, then you are the product. Maybe the problem is that extensions stores aren't as monitized as the IOS and Android App stores?