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Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

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Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#21

Post by AznHisoka »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #20

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

I find it kind of frustrating that Google does nothing about extensions tracking your browser history, and quickly takes action against extensions like these. I hope Google has their Cambridge moment soon.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#23

Post by gnicholas »

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension.

This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences.

I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous version restored, and after that weeks more before we could push an update without having it get automatically rejected.

The only "good" news is they didn't uninstall our existing user base.

1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#24

Post by LoSboccacc »

millstone wrote: post #17
LoSboccacc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well the solution is sandboxed temporary runtime environment with user controlled session duration, user managed permissions and strong profile siloes, also known as: your browser.

How would browser extensions fit into this model?

They aren’t application they extend the environment on which the untrusted application run, as such they’re more like kernel modules in regard of security and threat modelling

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#25

Post by stephengillie »

pitaj wrote: post #13
stephengillie wrote: post #3

> Anyway, dear users of my Google search link fix extension. If you happen to use Google Chrome, I sincerely recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox. No, not only because of this simple extension of course. But Addons.Mozilla.Org policies happen to be enforced in a transparent way, and appealing is always possible. Mozilla also has a good track record of keeping out malicious extensions, something that cannot be said…

Are you saying that Firefox mobile has uninstalled add-ons from your browser multiple times? I've been running Nightly mobile for more than a year and never had that happen. It sounds like a very strange bug, maybe it had something to do with Sync?

> Are you saying that Firefox mobile has uninstalled add-ons from your browser multiple times?

Yes. Checked while posting this, and they're uninstalled again.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#26

Post by [deleted] »

glogla wrote: post #16
stephengillie wrote: post #3

> Anyway, dear users of my Google search link fix extension. If you happen to use Google Chrome, I sincerely recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox. No, not only because of this simple extension of course. But Addons.Mozilla.Org policies happen to be enforced in a transparent way, and appealing is always possible. Mozilla also has a good track record of keeping out malicious extensions, something that cannot be said…

How can you say extensions run on Chrome without issue in comparison to mobile Firefox, when mobile chrome has no extensions? What kind of twisted logic is this? uBlock can't run without issue on mobile Chrome, since there's no uBlock for mobile Chrome. Even super locked-down mobile Safari has ad blockers available.

[deleted]

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#27

Post by majewsky »

AznHisoka wrote: post #21
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #20

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

I find it kind of frustrating that Google does nothing about extensions tracking your browser history, and quickly takes action against extensions like these. I hope Google has their Cambridge moment soon.

> quickly

The "Google search link fix" extension by Wladimir Palant has existed for many years. (Source: I use it in Firefox.)

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#28

Post by majewsky »

dkns wrote: post #19
stephengillie wrote: post #3

> Anyway, dear users of my Google search link fix extension. If you happen to use Google Chrome, I sincerely recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox. No, not only because of this simple extension of course. But Addons.Mozilla.Org policies happen to be enforced in a transparent way, and appealing is always possible. Mozilla also has a good track record of keeping out malicious extensions, something that cannot be said…

On nightly, never had ublock or umatrix uninstalled.

Same for me on stable (desktop and mobile).

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#30

Post by crms1496 »

pitaj wrote: post #13
stephengillie wrote: post #3

> Anyway, dear users of my Google search link fix extension. If you happen to use Google Chrome, I sincerely recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox. No, not only because of this simple extension of course. But Addons.Mozilla.Org policies happen to be enforced in a transparent way, and appealing is always possible. Mozilla also has a good track record of keeping out malicious extensions, something that cannot be said…

Are you saying that Firefox mobile has uninstalled add-ons from your browser multiple times? I've been running Nightly mobile for more than a year and never had that happen. It sounds like a very strange bug, maybe it had something to do with Sync?

I've had uBlock disappear from the main menu in mobile Firefox, but it was still accessible from the add-ons screen. I can get uBlock to reappear in the menu by force quitting Firefox.
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