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This will continue to get worse until Google takes security seriously on the Web Store. They don't meaningfully review uploads and they don't seem to staff it w

This will continue to get worse until Google takes security seriously on the Web Store. They don't meaningfully review uploads and they don't seem to staff it well in general - they take a very long time to process DMCA-related stuff, and when they do flag something for review (VERY rare) the review can take a very long time. Maybe it's unreasonable for me to expect them to invest money into running their "Store" but maintaining a reasonably popular extension for a while gave me a very low opinion of the whole service. I always have gotten the impression that the Chrome Web Store is something they'd rather get rid of if extensions (especially ad blockers) weren't a necessary evil to maintain their market dominance in browsers. The install and update UX have always been kind of neglected and awkward, and the permissions model is bad. Manifest V3 "fixes" some of this, I guess. As of today if I go to the chrome web store and try to install the recommended extensions on the front page, all of the ones I checked need to "read and change all my data on all websites" in order to do things like add a context menu option or run a connection speed test. There's no way for an ordinary user to tell the difference between "Chrome's permission model is garbage so every extension asks for this horrible permission" and "This extension is malicious and is actually going to read/change all my data"

Larrikin 3y ago
Have you tried Firefox?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  I've been using Firefox since 1.0, yes. I still end up needing a Blink-based browser installed to do my day job and access government websites, though, which means Edge or Chrome.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> They don't meaningfully review uploads and they don't seem to staff it well in general Well, yeah; it's Google. Their entire approach to anything resembling support is to automate everything that can be automated, and utterly ignore anything that can't be.
tyingq 3y ago
The current plan just seems to be to progressively reduce the functionality of extensions to the point that they don't do anything useful.
mbreese 3y ago
Are you surprised though? The Chrome Web Store isn't really a store... it's not like Chrome can (or does) charge for extensions. The only ones that are commercial that I'm aware of are tied to external systems (password managers, note taking, etc), and it's not like Google gets a cut from that. So the store will always be a cost center with net-negative revenue. Knowing this, how could they realistically review anything manually? The only model that has had some success in this regard has been the Apple App Store, which routinely gets vilified for it's walled garden. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I'd pay extra for a more secure extension "store" for the (few) extensions that I use. Or pay more for the products I already pay for that provide extensions (1Password, Zotero, Pocket, etc...). But that would be a rounding error for Google's revenue, so I'm not holding my breath...

Larrikin 3y ago

Have you tried Firefox?

kevingadd 3y ago
I've been using Firefox since 1.0, yes. I still end up needing a Blink-based browser installed to do my day job and access government websites, though, which means Edge or Chrome.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> They don't meaningfully review uploads and they don't seem to staff it well in general Well, yeah; it's Google. Their entire approach to anything resembling support is to automate everything that can be automated, and utterly ignore anything that can't be.

tyingq 3y ago

The current plan just seems to be to progressively reduce the functionality of extensions to the point that they don't do anything useful.

mbreese 3y ago

Are you surprised though? The Chrome Web Store isn't really a store... it's not like Chrome can (or does) charge for extensions. The only ones that are commercial that I'm aware of are tied to external systems (password managers, note taking, etc), and it's not like Google gets a cut from that. So the store will always be a cost center with net-negative revenue. Knowing this, how could they realistically review anything manually? The only model that has had some success in this regard has been the Apple App Store, which routinely gets vilified for it's walled garden. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I'd pay extra for a more secure extension "store" for the (few) extensions that I use. Or pay more for the products I already pay for that provide extensions (1Password, Zotero, Pocket, etc...). But that would be a rounding error for Google's revenue, so I'm not holding my breath...