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In addition to unifying the developer program, it allowed Safari extensions to take advantage of the same system level sandboxing used by full blown apps, which
by kitsunesoba 7y ago
In addition to unifying the developer program, it allowed Safari extensions to take advantage of the same system level sandboxing used by full blown apps, which is a big win in several ways — most notably, it lifts a ton of duplicated work off the shoulders of the Safari team.
Aside from that, these newer gen Safari extensions are technically a good deal more capable their traditional JS counterparts, because they have access to just about anything that LLVM/clang will compile into a Mac binary — Swift and Objective-C of course, but also the vast majority of AppKit, Grand Central Dispatch, C++, and plain C among other things. Extensions that do more than basic DOM manipulation could see massive performance boosts written this way, but unfortunately I have yet to see a Safari extension that makes novel use of these capabilities.
- oefrha 7y agoI think the end of the Safari developer program predates Safari App Extensions, but I could be wrong. By the way, in addition to making porting miserable, they also introduced annoyances like not being able to use the 1Password extension on Safari Tech Preview[1]. [1] https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/96182/1password-7-no-longer-distinguishes-between-safari-and-safari-technology-preview-other-confusion https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/96182/1password...
- kitsunesoba 7y agoIIRC they ended the Safari dev program shortly before removing support for old style extensions. Safari App Extensions and old extensions were supported for something like 3 or 4 major Safari releases.
- oefrha 7y agoHmm, then my memory of Safari App Extensions must have only started from when they became mandatory ;)