Was curious so just searched. Apparently Honey would try to get the best coupon codes on the web, but they started partnering with businesses to give (say) 10% off via a Honey-specific discount code (e.g. HONEY10), but Honey would ignore other (possibly greater) discounts, thus lulling users into a false sense of security that they were getting the best deal when they often weren't.
And, they highjacked referral links, ensuring they got referral commission, not the original referrer.
I used to use extensions in the chrome, but then I noticed that my dev server private urls were being botted.
Only way for them to get leaked was virus, google or some extension.
For me it seemed like the Window Resizer -addon was leaking every url I visited.
And it's not the only addon that seem to use google analytics. wtf?
I found it more trustworthy to code my own extensions via ChatGPT. These are the last 2 ones. I pretty much dont care if people use them, as the mostly fulfill my own usecases. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/comparative-chatgpt... https://thisismy.franzai.com/ The cost of (small) software is fast approaching 0, and it can be faster now to code your own solution, instead of looking for one that nearly mostly…
I found it more trustworthy to code my own extensions via ChatGPT. These are the last 2 ones. I pretty much dont care if people use them, as the mostly fulfill my own usecases. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/comparative-chatgpt... https://thisismy.franzai.com/ The cost of (small) software is fast approaching 0, and it can be faster now to code your own solution, instead of looking for one that nearly mostly…
I'm too scared to download extensions, so I use bookmarklets (on Firefox).
But I like your suggestion of using ChatGPT to write extensions.
I found it more trustworthy to code my own extensions via ChatGPT. These are the last 2 ones. I pretty much dont care if people use them, as the mostly fulfill my own usecases. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/comparative-chatgpt... https://thisismy.franzai.com/ The cost of (small) software is fast approaching 0, and it can be faster now to code your own solution, instead of looking for one that nearly mostly…
Haha exactly! Except I didnt bother to publish mine on chromewebstore, it's just on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/natural_aliens/geminiwrap_plugin ...it makes Gemini-Chat voice dictation a bit more useful. My other one, the remove-youtube-shorts, is almost an one-liner, so I didnt even publish it it's too trivial I think. Everyone just make your own!
Yeah, creating the marketing screenshots and filling out the publishing form takes longer nowadays then coding the actual extension.
Haha exactly! Except I didnt bother to publish mine on chromewebstore, it's just on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/natural_aliens/geminiwrap_plugin ...it makes Gemini-Chat voice dictation a bit more useful. My other one, the remove-youtube-shorts, is almost an one-liner, so I didnt even publish it it's too trivial I think. Everyone just make your own!
Yeah, creating the marketing screenshots and filling out the publishing form takes longer nowadays then coding the actual extension.
Also if anyone wants to uses an extension I would much rather they make the minuscule effort to create a local folder, put the files in there, and load the extension's folder with the chrome extension mgr. Maybe even they can peek at the source code...
I really don't see why I'd have to push my name, address, email etc on some google storefront and submit myself to spam reviews at the big "google-internet" party in the cloud.
Which of your single use extensions was causing you to like things on Facebook?
Not the GP, but just last week Google automatically removed a single use extension ( https://readermode.io ) from my browser after flagging it as malware (as I recall the extension updated itself a day before the removal). The extension has also been taken down from the Chrome web store ( https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/reader-mode/llimhhc... ) though Google hasn't provided any details about what it was doin…
I think the asymmetry in payoffs explains this, since a bad actor who baits and switches their extension could do massive damage to users. So google try to catch this behaviour and inevitably have some false positives (extensions labelled malware that actually aren't). The cost of a false positive is annoyance. The cost of real malware getting through could be your bank balance.
Was curious so just searched. Apparently Honey would try to get the best coupon codes on the web, but they started partnering with businesses to give (say) 10% off via a Honey-specific discount code (e.g. HONEY10), but Honey would ignore other (possibly greater) discounts, thus lulling users into a false sense of security that they were getting the best deal when they often weren't.
Before the rest of these abuses, Honey was blatantly tracking users and selling that data, which I think is a good example of how privacy abuse is often a canary of generally immoral behavior.