LONG term Pushbullet user here, big proponent of their services. I use it on Firefox myself so this doesn't affect me personally but still there are few services I will strongly advocate for. Pushbullet is one of them. Google, if you're listening this is going to make a lot of users very unhappy.
Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
151–160 of 811 posts
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#152It is a common theme with Google, what they do makes sense, but communication is impossible. I don't know if it is an artifact of overusing machine learning "our neural network trained on a variety of malware gives your app a score of 4.3, you have 15 days to get it down to 4.0". How is that calculated? No one knows, maybe you shouldn't use the location permission if your icon is red and your domain is not in .org, o…
It's that last one. Chrome Extensions, as a whole, are a value-add to Chrome. Individual Chrome extensions have negligible added value.
As long as Chrome isn't killing extensions "everyone cares about," their system can bias pretty far towards making it had to get an extension accepted and maintained in the store without killing the whole ecosystem.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?
I've been using Fastmail for more than a decade and I don't know why someone would trust something as important as email to a company like Google.
Because when it first was released, they were one of (if not the only) (free) email providers to give every user over a gigabyte of storage. At the time, most email providers only allowed mailboxes in the dozens of megabytes range.
Nowadays, everywhere gives you plenty of space, but for me personally, it’s just been the fact that I’ve been using it for so long and switching is a hassle. I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of other people, and for the majority, they probably also don’t care enough.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Fastmail for more than a decade and I don't know why someone would trust something as important as email to a company like Google.
I second the Fastmail vote. I have been a happy user for... maybe 3 years now? A while at least. The web UI on mobile and desktop is second-to-none (I love not having an app) and the spam filtering is as good or better than gmail and the other big players.
My current yearly subscription to Fastmail was about to expire today. Didn't think about it for a second before I renewed it for the third year.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#155Another happy PushBullet user here. Extremely useful for receiving text messages from my phone while on my laptop, especially for web apps that insist on sending security codes that way instead of TOTP. This sort of behavior from Google really is infuriating. How they can just decide to boot an app from the Chrome Store that is installed by over a million users is mind-boggling. It's a pity that Chrome doesn't allow…
> It's a pity that Chrome doesn't allow extensions to be installed from the new Edge store Why would anyone want to do that? What's a real pity is that they make every effort to block users from installing their own extensions. App stores are terrible.
How does Chrome prevent people from installing their own extensions? Download-and-unpack still works fine, last I checked.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#156Chrome extension developer here. Google ripped my Chrome extension off the app store about a month ago. I got a similar cryptic message, and then I scrambled to fix it, like you're doing now. Somehow my extension reappeared the next day. Email me pat [at] trypigeon [dot] co and I can send you some of the things I did that maybe have helped. Tweeting my support as well: https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/126063896…
I had a similar experience but it wasn't important to me and I let it go despite being a growing extension with 10s of thousands of users and lots of good reviews.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#157Chrome extension developer here. Google ripped my Chrome extension off the app store about a month ago. I got a similar cryptic message, and then I scrambled to fix it, like you're doing now. Somehow my extension reappeared the next day. Email me pat [at] trypigeon [dot] co and I can send you some of the things I did that maybe have helped. Tweeting my support as well: https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/126063896…
I have written about this recently on the Android side.
https://medium.com/@lazherrera/that-one-time-google-made-it-...
If you use any of the words related to the COVID-19 pandemic, they will pull your app, suspend you and ding your account.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#158The fact that they were requesting https://*/* and http://*/* (i.e. full control over all your accounts) without it being absolutely necessary reflects terribly on them. Still not clear why localhost (which can mean root access to the local machine since it may have localhost-only services that enable that) and cookies access is needed, also http://*.pushbullet.com is unnecessary since they should always use HTTPS. I…
Why doesn't Google notify all extension devs about these issues, to get it fixed, instead of sending vague threats?
Does Google send this message to random developers ([1]) and then look at the changes that developers make to get a list of things that developers apparently think are not so good?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems#Stomp_th...
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give a few examples of how Mozilla/Firefox have changed? We all know about FF Quantum. Yeah it sucks what happened. Maybe there was an alternative, but any one saying Firefox should’ve just stuck to not being compatible with Chromium extensions is kidding themselves on how badly that would’ve continued hurting Firefox’s market share. The XUL powered extension I’m sure were powerful so the outcry in certain pl…
I'm not the previous commenter, but on Android Mozilla is removing the ability to install extensions from third parties (think GitHub, etc.) and will trim the only left official extension store down to a few extensions. (I think it's below 20 right now.) An ecosystem where all extensions need to be channelled through one central power broker is pretty much the main requirement to allow them to do what Google is doing…
They've rebuilt their browser from scratch and are re-adding the APIs. It makes total sense to prioritize the most frequently used ones now and expand to the other ones later on.
For me personally, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin are already there. I don't think I need a third one at all.
Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
#160> The other opportunity is the tabs permission. This permission lets extensions see what tabs are open. Pushbullet uses this permission to avoid opening new tabs for websites that are already open when mirrored notifications are clicked. This is a small sacrifice to make to let go of a big permission. Let’s let it go!
No, that "small sacrifice" sounds super annoying! I don't use Pushbullet, but if I did and this got removed in an update, I'd be pissed off! At least leave it behind an optional checkbox.