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For people focusing their comments on this particular extension + the permissions it asks for, please take a quick look at the numerous recent posts in the offi

For people focusing their comments on this particular extension + the permissions it asks for, please take a quick look at the numerous recent posts in the official forum for Chrome extension developers to see it's not an isolated issue: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chromium-extensions https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom... It's a systematic issue that isn't specific to anything Pushbullet is doing and it's been like this before the pandemic: - Reviews can take up to 3 weeks. This in alone would be crazy enough if you have an urgent bug to fix. - Rejection emails are vague and don't tell you what to fix. - After you guess at what to fix, you've then got to join the up to 3 weeks review queue again. - If you try too many times, your extension gets pulled. - On top of this, they've recently disabled new Chrome Web Store paid items, and user reviews. Can anyone from Google escalate this and help extension developers? I can't speak for everyone but there's lots of complaints in the forum and little action beyond "we hear you and are looking to improve things".

dilandau 6y ago
>We hear you and are eagerly looking to improve things. Joking aside, isn't this just what people should come to expect from the company that has always tried to normalize the "no support and no service" model? If these antics start causing GOOG to lose share in the browser market then they may review these policies, but I highly doubt it. At the end of the day GOOG is an ad company and publicly-traded at that. They have a bottom-line and a lot of shareholders watching it. Support channels/forums are probably not the way to go, in other words. Stop using their browser, stop using their search. That's probably the only way they will be incentivized to change.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > Stop using their browser, stop using their search. The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think). They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _good_.
  - tornato7 6y ago
    What should I use for search? I tried switching to DDG for a month but I kept finding myself manually typing in Google.com to make the more obscure searches.
    - salicideblock 6y ago
      That is my exact habit now - DDG for the easy/lazy stuff, google for more obscure. I'm still giving them some search info to profile me, but hopefully it's skewed enough that it's value is lower. And I'm definitely giving them less ad views. I actually prefer DDG in a few fronts, like configuration of language and region.
    - krallja 6y ago
      Well, quit typing google.com, for one. Use DDG’s !g feature. Or !sp, which is like Google results without the Google frontend. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
      - seph-reed 6y ago
        Couldn't find !sp. What is it?
        krallja 6y ago
        StartPage
    - core-questions 6y ago
      If you have all the adblockers and stuff, and open a fresh private browser, nothing wrong with taking advantage of Google's still-superior search for finding things.
- znpy 6y ago
  > "no support and no service" model? this is one of the reasons why Google cloud will lose to AWS in the long run. AWS is customer obsessed, Google is not.
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    At Amazon the most important person is the customer. At Google the most important person is the Google engineer. I firmly believe that's why they suck at selling enterprise products.
  - muratsu 6y ago
    I’ve emailed and sent Linkedin msgs to 3 people who work at gcp for cloud credits. They didn’t care. AWS gave us credits + support in less than 3 days. I wish Google best of luck with their 5yr strategy. Hope their enterprise game is better than their startup one.
    - choult 6y ago
      ... so you're upset that you didn't get a service for free?
      - wbl 6y ago
        If you're serious about spending a lot on the cloud it's reasonable to expect a taste. Just like an ice cream store.
        znpy 6y ago
        the free tier is for that, isn't it ?
        tams 6y ago
        You don't get much in terms of performance and capacity in the free tier preventing you from testing anything beyond the tiniest workloads. If you need to pre-arrange expenses with the finance department, it's much faster to test drive with credits.
_jal 6y ago
The rule still applies: if you build your business on someone else's property, don't act surprised when they they casually destroy you. It has happened again and again and again. Building for FB or Google is you making yourself their serf, and you will be allowed to exist at their whim.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  What business short of The Principality of Sealand's data warehousing is not "built on someone else's property"? Even a brick-and-mortar business needs to appease the taxman.
  - rpdillon 6y ago
    It's a matter of degree, I imagine. Some approaches expose one to this risk to a greater degree than others. The highest risk might be placing an app or extension into a walled-off store controlled by a single company with sole authority over what is listed there.
- stevespang 6y ago
  Yeah, if enough intelligent people would just band together and agree to NOT do business with any corporations or co's that don't offer live human people answering their phone with intelligible English within 3 minutes of connection, voice mail and robot mail prohibited - - - bring these bastards to their knees - - or put them out of business.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  How can you realistically avoid this for certain products though? For mobile for example, you've got the iOS and Android store policies to go through, the iOS and Android SDKs, and whatever restrictions Safari (e.g. no proper PWAs) and Chrome have. Not everything can be a website that just needs basic browser capabilities.
  - tonyztan 6y ago
    At least Android allows sideloading without using the Play Store. Chrome used to allow this, and I believe they've made it much more difficult.
wtetzner 6y ago
I guess the solution is to stop using Chrome.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andyrichardson 6y ago
  I blamed the Chrome Web Store team at first but I can understand why they're anxious about allowing extensions onto the store which basically access everything on your browser. The issue is the outdated permission spec for browser extensions (I've gone into more detail on another comment on this thread)
andyrichardson 6y ago
I want to share my opinion on this as it's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking to the Chrome Web Store team about. The very core of the issue here is less about the manual review process (although that sucks) and more about how the review process is necessary due to how extension permissions work in browsers to-date. The current process works similar to how Android and IOS permissions worked back in the day by requiring the user to grant all permissions up front (equivalent to giving an extension sudo permission to your browser). The feedback you'll most likely get from Google on this isue is that the solution to this is to narrow down what URLs your extension works on... but that comes with a pretty big assumption that an extension can declare that information up front. Many extensions (including developer tooling) don't need to run on EVERY page - they need to run on specific pages where some extension-specific code is running (this is the case with Urql, Preact, React, Rexux devtools). Narrowing down by URL just isn't possible and an ad-hoc solution where extension-specific code on the webpage can trigger permission requests (similar to how a website requests access to your camera) is needed. I've written up a proposal for this case which I think addresses 90% of use cases where "sudo permissions" are being requested up front and in reality, could be requested on an ad-hoc basis. Whether it's an agreement or some criticism, anyone who is able to get involved in this discussion - please do! Every other platform is using ad-hoc permissions and we need to push for the same with browser extensions. Here's the proposal: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/YyVw0OEkUXA https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom... Here's my rant on Twitter about this problem (see retweeted comment): https://twitter.com/andyrichardsonn/status/1252920565696004096 https://twitter.com/andyrichardsonn/status/12529205656960040...

dilandau 6y ago

>We hear you and are eagerly looking to improve things. Joking aside, isn't this just what people should come to expect from the company that has always tried to normalize the "no support and no service" model? If these antics start causing GOOG to lose share in the browser market then they may review these policies, but I highly doubt it. At the end of the day GOOG is an ad company and publicly-traded at that. They have a bottom-line and a lot of shareholders watching it. Support channels/forums are probably not the way to go, in other words. Stop using their browser, stop using their search. That's probably the only way they will be incentivized to change.

core-questions 6y ago
> Stop using their browser, stop using their search. The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think). They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _good_.
- tornato7 6y ago
  What should I use for search? I tried switching to DDG for a month but I kept finding myself manually typing in Google.com to make the more obscure searches.
  - salicideblock 6y ago
    That is my exact habit now - DDG for the easy/lazy stuff, google for more obscure. I'm still giving them some search info to profile me, but hopefully it's skewed enough that it's value is lower. And I'm definitely giving them less ad views. I actually prefer DDG in a few fronts, like configuration of language and region.
  - krallja 6y ago
    Well, quit typing google.com, for one. Use DDG’s !g feature. Or !sp, which is like Google results without the Google frontend. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
    - seph-reed 6y ago
      Couldn't find !sp. What is it?
      - krallja 6y ago
        StartPage
  - core-questions 6y ago
    If you have all the adblockers and stuff, and open a fresh private browser, nothing wrong with taking advantage of Google's still-superior search for finding things.
znpy 6y ago
> "no support and no service" model? this is one of the reasons why Google cloud will lose to AWS in the long run. AWS is customer obsessed, Google is not.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  At Amazon the most important person is the customer. At Google the most important person is the Google engineer. I firmly believe that's why they suck at selling enterprise products.
- muratsu 6y ago
  I’ve emailed and sent Linkedin msgs to 3 people who work at gcp for cloud credits. They didn’t care. AWS gave us credits + support in less than 3 days. I wish Google best of luck with their 5yr strategy. Hope their enterprise game is better than their startup one.
  - choult 6y ago
    ... so you're upset that you didn't get a service for free?
    - wbl 6y ago
      If you're serious about spending a lot on the cloud it's reasonable to expect a taste. Just like an ice cream store.
      - znpy 6y ago
        the free tier is for that, isn't it ?
        tams 6y ago
        You don't get much in terms of performance and capacity in the free tier preventing you from testing anything beyond the tiniest workloads. If you need to pre-arrange expenses with the finance department, it's much faster to test drive with credits.

_jal 6y ago

The rule still applies: if you build your business on someone else's property, don't act surprised when they they casually destroy you. It has happened again and again and again. Building for FB or Google is you making yourself their serf, and you will be allowed to exist at their whim.

moron4hire 6y ago
What business short of The Principality of Sealand's data warehousing is not "built on someone else's property"? Even a brick-and-mortar business needs to appease the taxman.
- rpdillon 6y ago
  It's a matter of degree, I imagine. Some approaches expose one to this risk to a greater degree than others. The highest risk might be placing an app or extension into a walled-off store controlled by a single company with sole authority over what is listed there.
stevespang 6y ago
Yeah, if enough intelligent people would just band together and agree to NOT do business with any corporations or co's that don't offer live human people answering their phone with intelligible English within 3 minutes of connection, voice mail and robot mail prohibited - - - bring these bastards to their knees - - or put them out of business.
seanwilson 6y ago
How can you realistically avoid this for certain products though? For mobile for example, you've got the iOS and Android store policies to go through, the iOS and Android SDKs, and whatever restrictions Safari (e.g. no proper PWAs) and Chrome have. Not everything can be a website that just needs basic browser capabilities.
- tonyztan 6y ago
  At least Android allows sideloading without using the Play Store. Chrome used to allow this, and I believe they've made it much more difficult.

wtetzner 6y ago

I guess the solution is to stop using Chrome.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andyrichardson 6y ago
I blamed the Chrome Web Store team at first but I can understand why they're anxious about allowing extensions onto the store which basically access everything on your browser. The issue is the outdated permission spec for browser extensions (I've gone into more detail on another comment on this thread)

andyrichardson 6y ago

I want to share my opinion on this as it's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking to the Chrome Web Store team about. The very core of the issue here is less about the manual review process (although that sucks) and more about how the review process is necessary due to how extension permissions work in browsers to-date. The current process works similar to how Android and IOS permissions worked back in the day by requiring the user to grant all permissions up front (equivalent to giving an extension sudo permission to your browser). The feedback you'll most likely get from Google on this isue is that the solution to this is to narrow down what URLs your extension works on... but that comes with a pretty big assumption that an extension can declare that information up front. Many extensions (including developer tooling) don't need to run on EVERY page - they need to run on specific pages where some extension-specific code is running (this is the case with Urql, Preact, React, Rexux devtools). Narrowing down by URL just isn't possible and an ad-hoc solution where extension-specific code on the webpage can trigger permission requests (similar to how a website requests access to your camera) is needed. I've written up a proposal for this case which I think addresses 90% of use cases where "sudo permissions" are being requested up front and in reality, could be requested on an ad-hoc basis. Whether it's an agreement or some criticism, anyone who is able to get involved in this discussion - please do! Every other platform is using ad-hoc permissions and we need to push for the same with browser extensions. Here's the proposal: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/YyVw0OEkUXA https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom... Here's my rant on Twitter about this problem (see retweeted comment): https://twitter.com/andyrichardsonn/status/1252920565696004096 https://twitter.com/andyrichardsonn/status/12529205656960040...