Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

I reset Firefox recently on an ancient Linux laptop and before I got uBlock origin set back up the browser was nearly unusable. I had taken for granted how much it was doing. If I ever get out of this deep financial hole I am sending gorhill a large donation (if he accepts, I recall in the past he wasn't taking any). One of the most, if not THE most useful QOL add-ons in my view.

> It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by the new owners. ... We are witnessing the failure of browser vendors to recognize the value of our labor and the important role it plays in a healthy browser ecosystem.

So this is an interesting philosophical question - the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension. It's the market value of the trust of the extension's userbase. Is that the value of the extension developer's labor?

I would argue not really. The value of a bank, for instance, is not the amount of money in all of the vaults. That money is held in trust for customers, and it is not for the owner of the bank to dispose of. Therefore, nobody who makes a fair offer for the bank should expect those resources in the transaction, so a fair market price for the bank is much less - such as the present value of the interest earned by the bank minus the interest returned to customers.

In particular, the only reason the bank has customers is they expect to get their money back, generally with interest, at some point in the future. If they didn't, they'd put their money elsewhere. So if a bank is willing to sell the contents of the customer accounts, that indicates incomplete information in the market - customers didn't know the bank wasn't trustworthy. The true market value of the bank, in a perfect-information market, would be close to zero.

It seems like the problem here is that we know two ways of compensating browser extension developers: "don't" and "breach your users' trust." Those point to wildly undervalued and wildly overvalued estimates of the fair market value of the developers' work. And we should come up with some fairer way to value their work (or, more fundamentally, to compensate them; we may not need to monetize the extension, necessarily) first, and I'm not totally sure it's the fault of browsers for not having had such a clever idea - it seems like we collectively need to figure that out.

>BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster

IE (used to?) have this bottom notification warning about 'X plugin is slowing IE, would you like to disable it?'. Perhaps Firefox should add similar feature and notify users about slow plugins, maybe even with some actual data instead of a vague slowness claim.

Between every release making we worry what functionality I'm going to lose and which extensions will stop working, or having all my containers wiped out permanently, Mozilla is failing extension users.

As an extension developer who recently got one of these offers, your analysis is a good verbalization of my gut feeling on the matter. I turned it down, of course.

While users may feel bad about extension developers not being compensated, I feel like the larger story here is that:

- Companies are buying extensions for nefarious purposes, which presents a huge security risk.

- Evidently, app stores are sufficiently bad at detecting this that it remains profitable.