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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

#171

Post by sb8244 »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #54
vezycash wrote: post #26

Developers evangelized Android and Chrome in their early days - created the monsters. People making Chrome only sites are feeding the monster. Instead of Kozmos shutting down, the best revenge would making a firefox extension and getting their users to switch.

Or even Edge. Their new Chromium based builds are Chrome compatible and have their own store.

The great thing here is that it is literally 100% compatible with Chrome extensions.

I have been working on an extension that uses Chrome's Debugger API, lots of tab / network related APIs, and DevTools. I spun it up on Edge the other day and...it just worked. Everything worked.

I can't say the same for firefox. They do a good job bringing over some extension APIs, but I find it severely lacking for my use case.

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

#172

Post by rusabd »

Eventually, somebody will write bots to deal with this robotic bureaucracy and it will be matter of how much licenses and CPU power you have to negotiate a better deal. Essentially, it will be like rich people nowadays solve issues between themselves using lawers.

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

#173

Post by hectormalot »

gonehome wrote: post #129
komali2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through a similar process during quarantine, but for bluehost. I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.

What is a pass entry and what do you use it for? Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.

Not GP, but I’m assuming https://www.passwordstore.org/. Pass is a CLI password manager using Git and GPG to store and manage your passwords. I use it and sync passwords across devices through a git repo on self-hosted Gitea. Works really well if you’re comfortable with the CLI.

Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.

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

#174

Post by HappyJoy »

dannyw wrote: post #159
xg15 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider. This is all well and good, but they cornered the market for email, webapp, cloud storage and online translation products (and most importantly smartphones and web browsers). So until there is a viable alternative that the average person knows about , this will not change.

Generally speaking, the cornered the market through building good products that beat the competition. Do you remember free email providers prior to gmail? ISPs who you maintained a paying customer relationship with offered worse quotas and outdated web mails.

I remember Hotmail

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

#176

Post by HenryBemis »

dannyw wrote: post #159
xg15 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider. This is all well and good, but they cornered the market for email, webapp, cloud storage and online translation products (and most importantly smartphones and web browsers). So until there is a viable alternative that the average person knows about , this will not change.

Generally speaking, the cornered the market through building good products that beat the competition. Do you remember free email providers prior to gmail? ISPs who you maintained a paying customer relationship with offered worse quotas and outdated web mails.

I remember postmaster.co.uk and hotmail.com, they were around way before Gmail, and were less invasive, but I got my own domain and I serve my own emails since 2000 so I got that covered. I like my emails like I like my newspaper: NOT to read them together with someone else. I do know that emails are clear text etc but it's not fun that I get an email about XYZ and then every website I visit shows me ads about XYZ.

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

#177

Post by sb8244 »

Guzba wrote: post #70
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #25

Keeps me wondering, can we still install extensions outside their store? Or did they plug the last escape hatch and fucked it all up?

Chrome can load unpacked extensions by enabling Developer mode in about://extensions. Google will definitely get up in your business if you try to distribute an extension on your website this way though.

Can you go more into what they do if you try to bypass their distribution mechanism? Is there any existing posts sharing experience? I'm curious as this has always been my backup plan if Google takes this action against my extensions.

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

#178

Post by on_and_off »

kodablah wrote: post #150
Kaze404 wrote: post #8

I don't understand how we've normalized Googles behavior to the point where this doesn't even shock me anymore. When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS according to the bug reports I could find, and in a classic Google move they shut the service down before ever fixing it. That might sound like a non sequitur but it's ridiculous to me how little Google cares abou…

> What can we do about this? There is a much harsher solution that I'm not even sure I advocate yet: stigmatize employment there. At-will employment somewhere when we can easily go elsewhere means that, while we don't necessarily condone all that our company does, we in general support/accept the company and its approach. Therefore, absent hardships, we must assume Google employees generally support Google actions as…

Some of the kindest people I know work at Google.

The truth is that it is become an enormous company and somebody working e.g. on the internals of Compose code has no power over how Chrome handles extensions.

I despise Google more and more as a company but that's not going to affect them.

In the areas where Google has some real alternatives, switch to these.

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

#179

Post by paulcole »

Awelton wrote: post #38

Maybe someday everyone will realize that google isn't a company that provides services to users, it's a data theft company. They don't really care about bugs or frustrations because they aren't in the business of providing things to you. You are not their customer. The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider. They are an advertising compa…

> They use their products to steal your information.

They aren’t stealing from me. I get to watch YouTube videos, store my files in Drive, and use gmail — all things that I like quite a lot. Yes there are alternatives to gmail and Drive, none of which are good enough for the hassle of switching. There is no YouTube alternative.

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

#180

Post by Drdrdrq »

renewiltord wrote: post #103
amirathi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that Google don't want to hire humans and run customer support centers. According to reports, this has bit them in GCP adoption as well. That's fine but at least have a human review before taking disastrous actions like taking down extensions, lockdown Gmail accounts. If you can't afford even that at least have an appeal process where human would review the case. If you can't make the economics work even f…

GCP does have support engineers who work with you on things.

It does? Haven't used it yet and have no near future plans to change that. As long as there's a single account, the support of each part of Google matters, because it could cause your account to be closed.
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