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

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

#501

Post by dbjorge »

hanklazard wrote: post #197
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…

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 work for Microsoft on a moderately complex chromium extension. We've investigated porting it to Firefox (we've had a small but nonzero minority of users ask about it, and several of our engineers have a personal interest in it), but it's really hard to estimate ahead of time how much effort it's going to be. Most of the issues are not so bad to fix individually, it's just an unknown-length onion peeling exercise. It's especially challenging when a library/framework you use is impacted by a difference and its maintainers aren't motivated to improve compatibility; some examples of this we've run into include "Firefox's RegExp implementation doesn't support named capture groups" (but the library author doesn't want to make the code less readable by not using them) and "Firefox's auto-size behavior for extension popup UI (what you see when you click am extensions toolbar icon) sometimes sends spurious window resize events when the DOM is modified" (the UI control library we use has behavior to dismiss context menus on window resize, which this breaks).

The most painful incompatibility I've read about was in the Bitwarden extension, which basically doesn't support most operations in Firefox private windows because Firefox intentionally doesn't support getBackgroundPage() from there, and Bitwarden architected their extension to use that for all IPC between their frontend and backend layers. You can avoid that incompatibility by using runtime.sendMessage for that purpose, but they didn't know that at the time they wrote it (there's a warning about it in the MDN docs for getBackgroundPage now, but that warning wasn't there at the time). We happened to have gotten lucky in our extension in that we use sendMessage for the same purpose, but we certainly didn't know about that incompatibility at the time we were making the architectural decision.

Beyond just making it work, our team would also want to be able to automate regression tests against Firefox if we were to officially support it. For a long time, selenium was the most realistic option for that, but we switched away from selenium to puppeteer a year ago due to reliability issues with the former. Now that Firefox support in puppeteer is very recently starting to stabilize, we're hopeful we'd be able to use that, but we haven't tried it yet and it's new enough that we wouldn't expect it to be fully compatible/stable yet.

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

#502

Post by zerd »

randomdude402 wrote: post #447
cutemonster wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bookmarking service sounded to me like something Google wanted to operate themselves, and I was thinking maybe that was related to why it got taken down. At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?

Google already has a bookmarking service at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ I have stuff saved in there dating from 2007 to 2015. Used to use a Firefox extension to load them in the sidebar.

Exactly, they have a competing service. They also took down Podcast Addict while keeping their competing podcast app which violated the same terms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427

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

#503

Post by omnimus »

danShumway wrote: post #460
stanislavb wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day. The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam. With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit. Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original addr…

I don't want to spoil any joy of yours but this is in my experience pretty standard with most email providers.

With some you can do the + trick (which gmail probably still does) but i just have my domain as catchall and it works pretty great with blacklisting.

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

#504

Post by Larrikin »

adrianN wrote: post #461
Larrikin wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazy web devs that only test in Chrome and maybe safari that constantly break things in other browsers. I don't mind sending the angry support email and using chrome for a single task here and there but others might.

I never used Chrome and never encountered a website that didn't work on Firefox. I think this concern is a bit overblown.

Bank of America didn't work for the better part of last year. Chase Rewards are currently broken since last week. Its easy to drop small sites that don't test but my experience has been they actually bother testing and it's the major sites that actually have problems.

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

#505

Post by thejynxed »

Larrikin wrote: post #504
adrianN wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never used Chrome and never encountered a website that didn't work on Firefox. I think this concern is a bit overblown.

Bank of America didn't work for the better part of last year. Chase Rewards are currently broken since last week. Its easy to drop small sites that don't test but my experience has been they actually bother testing and it's the major sites that actually have problems.

I've had Firefox fail to work properly on the sites of Slashdot, Amazon, Newegg, Chase, BoA, GE, Walmart, the IRS, PennDOT, Mozilla's own org site, WaPo, NPR, Fox, Disney, and a whole host of others.

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

#506

Post by singron »

rightbyte wrote: post #476
singron wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had different knobs available to them, and it's not clear given the opportunity that they wouldn't try it. E.g. it was less common for PCs to be connected to the internet and receive OS updates, so they wouldn't have an effective way of using a policy like that. They certainly did their best to prevent any other OS from being on your hardware.

They still are not doing it right? You just get the "downloaded from internet" warning.

I think you can argue that current day MS is a little more afraid of anti-trust action than 1990s MS. Game developers were legitimately scared that MS was going to do this for windows and start taking their own 30% cuts from all PC games. I'm not sure if Valve confirmed it, but it seems likely that SteamOS/Steam machines were at least partly a backup plan for ensuring there was a place to sell games without MS skimming off the top.

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

#507

Post by thejynxed »

city41 wrote: post #61
deadwing0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat agree, yet wouldn't a healthy extension ecosystem (excellent term, btw) attract more users to Chrome and in turn keep users more entwined in the larger Google ecosystem? I guess there is a cost/benefit analysis done. They put just enough effort into it to get the return or results they want. The little guys like OP (who arguably make the best content because it's open source and not full of trackers or oth…

I don’t know at all, but if I had to guess extension usage is pretty low. I’m not sure the average user really sees browser extensions as something they need. They aren’t as obvious as say mobile apps. On the flip side, extensions like Honey seem to suggest at least enough people use them to be of some worth.

Some of the more popular extensions have thirty+ million users, and this is for trivial fluff functionality. When you hit up the extensions dealing with adblocking or say, interacting with Instagram, they can hit 100+ million easily.

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

#508

Post by Aeolun »

microcolonel wrote: post #293
Aeolun wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want to keep paying google for their shitty AI’s mistakes?

The alternative is being disappeared without recourse, if you have to pay 40 bucks when they screw up, it is what it is, and you can make a decision.

That is (morally) wrong on so many levels. It’s basically what regulations were invented for.

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

#509

Post by microcolonel »

Aeolun wrote: post #508
microcolonel wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is being disappeared without recourse, if you have to pay 40 bucks when they screw up, it is what it is, and you can make a decision.

That is (morally) wrong on so many levels. It’s basically what regulations were invented for.

What would your brilliant regulation entail? Forcing companies to publish software for free when their automated systems think it's malware?

Could you even summarize a piece of legislation that doesn't amount to "describe Google, then make everything that annoys us about Google illegal for companies fitting that description"?

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

#510

Post by [deleted] »

Hello71 wrote: post #491
tjpnz wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they'v…

while this is arguably true, it has nothing to do with the misappropriation of the original word. something can be terrible and yet not justify using words commonly agreed to mean different things. it reminds me of the recent trend to use "assault" when referring to all types of harassment, regardless of whether physical violence was carried out or even implied. you can argue that shadow banning is bad, but if you go…

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