Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

blog.pushbullet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 811 posts

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#51

Post by the_jeremy »

syshum wrote: post #25
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to Firefox. It has gotten much better.

While Firefox is better than Chrome... Mozilla is becoming more and more Google Like as time progresses, where a few years ago I would have believed it would be unthinkable for Mozilla do so something like this to an extension, today I am not so sure I would trust them either

Who do you trust? Certainly not Chromium-Edge. That leaves "only browse the internet on a Mac with Safari" or browsers with such tiny market share that they'll never be tested against, and sites will routinely be broken for you. My company doesn't do any non-Chrome compatibility testing, so all our intranet sites require Chrome.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#52

Post by snazz »

raybb wrote: post #9

This is awful. I'm going to send GCP support a message with the small hope that someone can flag it up to the right team.

GCP and the rest of Google are separated from each other similarly to how YouTube and Google are separated. Unfortunately, the odds of that technique working are very low.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#53

Post by danpalmer »

As much as we can criticise Google's handling of this situation, the fact that the developer was able to reduce permissions from accessing data on _all websites_ down to _their website_, as well as tighten up a few other permissions, shows that Google is correct that the extension is asking for more than it needs.

I hope the developer finds another load of permissions they can tighten up, resubmits, and is approved. As long as it results in permissions being more correct this is a very positive thing for users because for every PushBullet there's hundreds of attempts at malicious Chrome extensions that are abusing permissions.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#55

Post by [deleted] »

MattGaiser wrote: post #26

Any reason that Google doesn't give reasons and ways to comply? I haven't ever had to deal with a Google person regarding Android development, but when I built stuff for Blackberry (miss that company), they always provided nice and detailed feedback. Blackberry famously let legal influence design, so I would be surprised if it was a cover your ass thing.

[deleted]

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#56

Post by Animats »

It's inherent in what Pushbullet is doing that Google would not like it. It aggregates user data from multiple sources, including SMS, notifications, and chat, sends it to the Pushbullet servers, and sends it back out again. Only Google is allowed to aggregate data like that.

Fuhrer command! Suffer us to obey!

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#57

Post by pixelHD »

the_af wrote: post #40
Baeocystin wrote: post #11

Another long-term PushBullet customer here. Anyone at Google who is listening- this kind of behavior kills my desire to continue using your products dead. I need functionality, of the type PushBullet has provided for years, to do my work. The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. Behavior like this is simply unacceptable. If you want people to use your services, you need to have s…

> The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. What did they do to ublock origin? The single best Chrome extension ever . If it stops working and I must suffer YouTube ads again, it's bye bye Chrome.

I'm assuming this [0] is what the commenters are referring to. Google is proposing changing web request api, which can break how ublock origin works.

Also, this [1] happened.

[0]: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-manifest-v3-ad-... [1]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#59

Post by AaronFriel »

graham_paul wrote: post #37
Baeocystin wrote: post #11

Another long-term PushBullet customer here. Anyone at Google who is listening- this kind of behavior kills my desire to continue using your products dead. I need functionality, of the type PushBullet has provided for years, to do my work. The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. Behavior like this is simply unacceptable. If you want people to use your services, you need to have s…

elaborate on the ublock nerfing?

Chrome's Extension v3 API will remove the ability for uBlock Origin to filter web requests in code, instead the application will have to submit a list of URLs to filter to an internal API and this list has a maximum size and limits the flexibility of the URL filtering.

See the uBlock Origin author's post: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

This is ironic, because uBlock implements an extremely efficient filter and is even looking into using WASM to speed it up even more. Google's public position is that implementing functionality in JS or WASM is unacceptably slow. They say "[Preventing or weakening ad blockers] is absolutely not the goal. In fact, this change is meant to give developers a way to create safer and more performant ad blockers."[1]

Google's public position is also that WASM is "consistently fast"[2], fast enough to rewrite Google Earth to target it[3], and "It's entirely feasible to build a complex code-base to run performantly in the browser using WebAssembly"[4].

So which is it? Is the Web Request API being deprecated because it's not possible to write performant code in extensions using Chrome's powerful JS and WASM engine, or is it possible but there might be some other, different reason that they're blocking it?

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...

[2] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/hotpath-wi...

[3] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/webassembly-brings-google-...

[4] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/08/wasm-av1#f...

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#60

Post by [deleted] »

the_af wrote: post #40
Baeocystin wrote: post #11

Another long-term PushBullet customer here. Anyone at Google who is listening- this kind of behavior kills my desire to continue using your products dead. I need functionality, of the type PushBullet has provided for years, to do my work. The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. Behavior like this is simply unacceptable. If you want people to use your services, you need to have s…

> The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. What did they do to ublock origin? The single best Chrome extension ever . If it stops working and I must suffer YouTube ads again, it's bye bye Chrome.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN