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The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the mo

The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing, maybe too much fraud? I understand shutting down expensive products. It's weird keeping the expensive product running and shutting off the revenue model, no?

jfoster 6y ago
Anecdotally, I could probably get lots of value from some extensions (even free ones) but I generally won't consider installing them because a lot of the ones I could get value from would be able to intercept all data rather than specific sites or during times when I choose to activate them. I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome. I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  > I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above. For what it's worth you can create a new user profile in Chrome (click your profile picture in the top left then click "add"), and it'll open a new window which is completely isolated from all your regular browsing. It's a decent approach if you want to install a ton of dev extensions. Also, I run a paid Chrome extension and have good conversion rates from the website -> downloading the free version, so I don't think a lot of users are that bothered by this anyway. People recommend Lastpass, uBlock and Grammarly all the time, which ask for wide permissions.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed. In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?
- rswail 6y ago
  As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc. The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps. So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.
_qulr 6y ago
> Is it just that nobody paid for things? Correct. Most people expect Chrome extensions for free.
wrinkl3 6y ago
> That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! I bought into the browser extensions heavily when they first became a thing - I was in high-school and would take pride in beefing up my browser with as many utilities as humanly possible. Once the novelty wore off it became apparent that I was using only a couple of them passively, and had absolutely zero need for the rest. Extensions seem neat in theory, but they're mainly useful from removing annoying/harmful behaviour from websites, and monetizing those cases is tricky. People would probably pay for Adblockers, but there's no need.
zmmmmm 6y ago
I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).
- lallysingh 6y ago
  .. "will this get me promoted or should I work on something new?"
- jake_morrison 6y ago
  My guess is that Google promotes people based on creating a new service, but not taking over an old service and running it / improving it. So when a manager leaves the organization, their service is orphaned: there is nobody to run it, and nobody to fight for it, so they shut it down. Customers and revenue are more or less irrelevant to this calculation.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened. It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.
- adonese 6y ago
Thaxll 6y ago
I use Chrome since day 1 and today I learned you can buy extensions, that should give you some perspective.
- usepgp 6y ago
  I _work_ on chrome and today I learned you can buy extensions.
bawolff 6y ago
Nobody has ever managed to sell a web browser (Netscape's problem), im not sure why people would buy extensions when they wouldn't be willing to buy a browser.
- _qulr 6y ago
  iCab The problem today is that nobody can even make a browser. Even Microsoft failed, and was forced to adopt Chromium. The web has become far too complex.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    "Forced" is a bit strong. They did the math and realized that being competitive in the browser market was not worth the $$$$ they would have to spend to get there. Given that web browsers aren't really going to make MS money, unless they manage to get full dominance (which isnt really their strategy anymore and would be difficult in modern context), it was probably a smart business decision. If the business calculus was different i am sure they could.
    - jfrunyon 6y ago
      That's how a business gets forced to do something: money.
      - josefx 6y ago
        Google did actively slow and cripple its flagship sites on competing browsers without suffering any consequences. No amount of money will help against that kind of advantage.
        can16358p 6y ago
        I can confirm. We have a normal Google doc (nothing super fancy) that spans about 10 pages at most, and when I scroll past about 8th page in Safari, scrolling becomes almost unusually sluggish and everything starts lagging.
pishpash 6y ago
Maybe because mobile Chrome refuses to support extensions for fear of adblock killing the golden goose?
toyg 6y ago
Average users just don’t “do” extensions. People typically don’t mod their software. I’ve learnt this over the years. Any sort of extension, “power toy” or customization is always going to be a niche, in the great scheme of things. > Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.
- can16358p 6y ago
  Even many power users don't do extensions. I'm a developer, who is heavily into frontend stuff, and even though I tried many times, I could never get used to using any extension in my life. I set up a DNS based blocker and that's more than enough. I don't try to hunt 100% of the ads, there's nothing wrong if some of them are displayed as long as the pages aren't fully bloated with them anyway.
skinnymuch 6y ago
A small fraction of people including tech people know you can charge for browser extensions as a one off. I’m still not sure if you can actually. I’ve never seen an integrated payment for an extension. At best something like a SaaS with focus on browser extension. The amount of profit from this has to be so tiny for Google or any mid cap tech company since no one really knows about it. I made a comment with some upvoteS here a week or two ago about my hopes that the new Safari could maybe usher in an era of browser extensions being seen more as apps than current status quo but without the ridiculous high priced recurring prices being added more and more. IE paying $1+ one time, or $1-3/mo, or $10-25/year being a not uncommon situation would be great in my opinion. Both stamp out the rampant data mining extensions do, legitimize extensions more, and hopefully get some indie developers paid.
r14n 6y ago
The marketplace did not fail. The Chrome Web Store lives on - it's just the PAYMENT section of it that fails. All the extensions will still exist and be available for download, we devs just can't use Google's payment or subscription service anymore. So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info. And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(

jfoster 6y ago

Anecdotally, I could probably get lots of value from some extensions (even free ones) but I generally won't consider installing them because a lot of the ones I could get value from would be able to intercept all data rather than specific sites or during times when I choose to activate them. I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome. I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.

seanwilson 6y ago
> I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above. For what it's worth you can create a new user profile in Chrome (click your profile picture in the top left then click "add"), and it'll open a new window which is completely isolated from all your regular browsing. It's a decent approach if you want to install a ton of dev extensions. Also, I run a paid Chrome extension and have good conversion rates from the website -> downloading the free version, so I don't think a lot of users are that bothered by this anyway. People recommend Lastpass, uBlock and Grammarly all the time, which ask for wide permissions.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.

nitrogen 6y ago
Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed. In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?
rswail 6y ago
As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc. The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps. So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.

_qulr 6y ago

> Is it just that nobody paid for things? Correct. Most people expect Chrome extensions for free.

wrinkl3 6y ago

> That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! I bought into the browser extensions heavily when they first became a thing - I was in high-school and would take pride in beefing up my browser with as many utilities as humanly possible. Once the novelty wore off it became apparent that I was using only a couple of them passively, and had absolutely zero need for the rest. Extensions seem neat in theory, but they're mainly useful from removing annoying/harmful behaviour from websites, and monetizing those cases is tricky. People would probably pay for Adblockers, but there's no need.

zmmmmm 6y ago

I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).

lallysingh 6y ago
.. "will this get me promoted or should I work on something new?"
jake_morrison 6y ago
My guess is that Google promotes people based on creating a new service, but not taking over an old service and running it / improving it. So when a manager leaves the organization, their service is orphaned: there is nobody to run it, and nobody to fight for it, so they shut it down. Customers and revenue are more or less irrelevant to this calculation.
londons_explore 6y ago
It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened. It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.
adonese 6y ago

Thaxll 6y ago

I use Chrome since day 1 and today I learned you can buy extensions, that should give you some perspective.

usepgp 6y ago
I _work_ on chrome and today I learned you can buy extensions.

bawolff 6y ago

Nobody has ever managed to sell a web browser (Netscape's problem), im not sure why people would buy extensions when they wouldn't be willing to buy a browser.

_qulr 6y ago
iCab The problem today is that nobody can even make a browser. Even Microsoft failed, and was forced to adopt Chromium. The web has become far too complex.
- bawolff 6y ago
  "Forced" is a bit strong. They did the math and realized that being competitive in the browser market was not worth the $$$$ they would have to spend to get there. Given that web browsers aren't really going to make MS money, unless they manage to get full dominance (which isnt really their strategy anymore and would be difficult in modern context), it was probably a smart business decision. If the business calculus was different i am sure they could.
  - jfrunyon 6y ago
    That's how a business gets forced to do something: money.
    - josefx 6y ago
      Google did actively slow and cripple its flagship sites on competing browsers without suffering any consequences. No amount of money will help against that kind of advantage.
      - can16358p 6y ago
        I can confirm. We have a normal Google doc (nothing super fancy) that spans about 10 pages at most, and when I scroll past about 8th page in Safari, scrolling becomes almost unusually sluggish and everything starts lagging.

pishpash 6y ago

Maybe because mobile Chrome refuses to support extensions for fear of adblock killing the golden goose?

toyg 6y ago

Average users just don’t “do” extensions. People typically don’t mod their software. I’ve learnt this over the years. Any sort of extension, “power toy” or customization is always going to be a niche, in the great scheme of things. > Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.

can16358p 6y ago
Even many power users don't do extensions. I'm a developer, who is heavily into frontend stuff, and even though I tried many times, I could never get used to using any extension in my life. I set up a DNS based blocker and that's more than enough. I don't try to hunt 100% of the ads, there's nothing wrong if some of them are displayed as long as the pages aren't fully bloated with them anyway.

skinnymuch 6y ago

A small fraction of people including tech people know you can charge for browser extensions as a one off. I’m still not sure if you can actually. I’ve never seen an integrated payment for an extension. At best something like a SaaS with focus on browser extension. The amount of profit from this has to be so tiny for Google or any mid cap tech company since no one really knows about it. I made a comment with some upvoteS here a week or two ago about my hopes that the new Safari could maybe usher in an era of browser extensions being seen more as apps than current status quo but without the ridiculous high priced recurring prices being added more and more. IE paying $1+ one time, or $1-3/mo, or $10-25/year being a not uncommon situation would be great in my opinion. Both stamp out the rampant data mining extensions do, legitimize extensions more, and hopefully get some indie developers paid.

r14n 6y ago

The marketplace did not fail. The Chrome Web Store lives on - it's just the PAYMENT section of it that fails. All the extensions will still exist and be available for download, we devs just can't use Google's payment or subscription service anymore. So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info. And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(