Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

Post by geza » Sat, May 23, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

zb1plus wrote: post #202

geza wrote: post #157

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejec…

That's very sad to hear, I've been an avid user of HabitLab. Thank you so much for developing this tool! I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Chromium fork with the HabitLab interventions integrated deeper into the browser? I think there's a lot of potential and interest for a productivity-oriented browser that helps stay focused and develop good time management skills.

Post by hanklazard » Sat, May 23, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

geza wrote: post #211

hanklazard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really sorry to hear that--it looks like a useful extension and I'm sure you've put a lot of hard work into it. Naive question to you and to other extension developers here ... how does Firefox do when it comes to this issue? Is it just that the market share is so much lower that it's not worth developing for FF? I ask this as a happy FF user on mac, linux, ios.

I tried porting the extension over to Firefox when Firefox switched to WebExtensions, and at the time there were tons of incompatibilities, mostly with Firefox's Shadow DOM implementation (HabitLab is a huge and complicated codebase, porting it is non-trivial - I had an issue tracking it at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/issues/137 ). I'm sure it's a valid option for smaller extensions however. At the moment I'…

Post by neya » Sat, May 23, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #209

Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad. Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules . And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this. With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" ( https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin... ), and then wrought gl…

Post by pictur » Sat, May 23, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

Post by Gustomaximus » Sat, May 23, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #35

deadwing0 wrote: post #19

Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business. It feels like to me that they have just be…

I can’t see how a healthy browser extension ecosystem would help Google. Without Google getting any real value out of it, it makes total sense they do a poor job managing it.