Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#51

Post by liability » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

asr wrote: post #13

On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox. 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 (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Fir…

Which browser extension is responsible for making Firefox slow as a slug when deleting large numbers history entries?

I've not checked the source, but my guess is firefox stores the history in a SQLite db and when you select 500 history items then delete them, it's doing 500 DELETEs, maybe even without a proper index. It's seriously slow.

There seems to be a lot of low hanging fruit in Firefox, but not being employed by Mozilla I don't particularly feel like my thoughts or contributions are welcome. The last time reported a bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org (which is a pain in the neck) I was told that accessibility on MacOS wasn't important enough for Mozilla to care about (paraphrasing.)

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#52

Post by stctw » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #35

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #12

Chrome and Google not caring or supporting these kind of things I get but Firefox's recent efforts seem to be either gross negligence or targeted moved to destroy their addon ecosystem. I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their cu…

Been trending that way for years now. Making a browser that does what you want it to do is way easier than making a browser that does what your users want it to do. Sometimes I wonder if the "iterate version integers every six weeks so our e-peen looks bigger" approach is to blame.

That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other.

Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web).

And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first?

Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#53

Post by oceanghost » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #34

oceanghost wrote: post #3

I know this is tangential-- I would like to write a FF extension -- can anyone point out some good resources for that? Beyond what's on Moz's official site of course.

I know you asked for resources beyond Mozilla's site, but Mozilla's documentation for extension developers is very accessible and includes complete code for example extensions: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

I will look at it again, thank you!

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#54

Post by hnaccy » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

swozey wrote: post #31

jhasse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.

Dark Reader which is one of my must-haves has a known Firefox performance issue on a LOT of sites that makes Firefox almost unusable for me, so I recently begrudgingly switched back to Chrome. https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535

>Unfortunately Firefox is terribly slow in unpredictable places. I periodically try to find out what exactly makes it work slow in Firefox. For example this change improved twitter.com loading from ~30s to ~1s.

His change[0] was changing array population from repeated concat to push. This is not an unpredictable hot spot but a developer not knowing his tools. Common sense is not premature optimization.

[0] https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07...

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#55

Post by geofft » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #50

geofft wrote: post #44

> 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 "…

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 ba…

Yes, agree - detecting extensions that have changed hands into someone who wants to "monetize" it and preventing those updates from getting to users definitely seems like a thing that the browser manufacturers should be doing (even if - and perhaps especially if - it lowers the apparent market value of extensions) and that the onus is on browser manufacturers / extension store operators to do so.

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#56

Post by hanniabu » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #44

> 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 "…

> the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension

Of even worse, inserting malicious code such as a keylogger.

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#57

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

throwaway5389 wrote: post #37

bduerst wrote: post #20

>The Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store do not offer features for supporting extension developers. That doesn't seem right - doesn't Google let developers monetize extensions in the chrome web store? You can publish Hosted Apps, Chrome Apps, Chrome Extensions, and Themes in the Chrome Web Store. Collectively these are called simply "Items". You have many choices when it comes to making money from items that you…

> it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension It'd be nice if they had 'trusted devs' or similar. Even if they provided a paid meatbag extension review service, I'd pay to get the plugins I use reviewed!

That's an interesting idea. I, too, would happily contribute to a funding pool to have a competent human analyze the extensions that I'm using. One would expect this to (loosely) allocate money to checking the extensions that are most used, so the ecosystem would benefit even for people who weren't contributing.

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#58

Post by cameronbrown » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #56

geofft wrote: post #44

> 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 "…

> the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension Of even worse, inserting malicious code such as a keylogger.

Even worse! A key-logger masquerading as a product! /s

cough Grammarly

https://techbeacon.com/security/grammarly-leaks-everything-y...

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#59

Post by geofft » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #56

geofft wrote: post #44

> 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 "…

> the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension Of even worse, inserting malicious code such as a keylogger.

Yup (I think I'm loosely counting that as exfiltration, because you can monetize an all-sites extension real effectively if you exfiltrate the browser cookies from online banking websites.... keyloggers only get you so far if they have 2FA, but a logged-in browser session is valuable.)

Re: Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers

#60

Post by mushufasa » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #44

> 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 "…

What if Google/Mozilla just awarded a monthly prize to developers based on the popularity of an extension?

Browser providers pay for ecosystem improvements -- a better product.