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Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

palant.de

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Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#62

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

I find it kind of frustrating that Google does nothing about extensions tracking your browser history, and quickly takes action against extensions like these. I hope Google has their Cambridge moment soon.

I have no doubt Google ruthlessly takes advantage of tracking data but that’s for them, not for third parties. Anything is possible but I think they’d see giving up data like that to a company like Cambridge to be surrendering a competitive advantage.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#63

They somehow have the man power to ban your extension in 2 hours and 30 minutes without an explanation as to why, but than when I get a fake copyright claim on my most popular YouTube video somehow it takes three months, 12 emails and I still don't get the ~$900 lost revenue back.

Mirror your videos to other services. If you want to make sure your content is preserved you can upload it to archive.org. There's also a huge difference in scale. There's not that many browser extensions to consider, but they have millions of videos on YouTube. It's not really comparable.

These are good suggestions but don't help the parent poster's lost revenue.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#64

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

I find it kind of frustrating that Google does nothing about extensions tracking your browser history, and quickly takes action against extensions like these. I hope Google has their Cambridge moment soon.

A slight irony is that this extension actually removes tracking capability from Google itself in the search. (I suppose only really if you have JS disabled, otherwise they can capture the click event in JS instead of handling links via a special redirect tracker).

To the author: Thanks for the extension. I'm a happy user on FF for a long time.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#65
post #56

What does the user story look like for installing a Chrome app locally? Do you need to go through tons of menus or is it just dev mode + easy/scriptable setup process?

For Chromebooks? I thought Google was deprecating chrome apps.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#66

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

The problem isn't that an extension was removed. There will always be erroneous attempts at making things safer for users when playing the game of content moderator. The problem is that Google is impossible to talk to, and makes no effort to help when things go wrong. As a current user of gmail this worries me.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#67
post #65
post #56

What does the user story look like for installing a Chrome app locally? Do you need to go through tons of menus or is it just dev mode + easy/scriptable setup process?

For Chromebooks? I thought Google was deprecating chrome apps.

I’m way out of the loop then, I guess. Back in my day you could move code files around your computer’s file system, and even run them with interpreters.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop contributing to google's ecosystem.

I have told them that this issue has pushed us to look more at other platforms. We are also on Firefox (much easier now that their extension platform is similar to Chrome’s), but we still have the vast majority of our users on Chrome (60k versus I even submitted our extension to Opera. Months went by with no response. Dev forums show that this is a common experience. We’re also on iOS, but since extensions don’t real…

You can start inviting users to install Firefox. If enough sites do it FF share will raise and Google will change their behavior.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#69
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that Firefox mobile has uninstalled add-ons from your browser multiple times? I've been running Nightly mobile for more than a year and never had that happen. It sounds like a very strange bug, maybe it had something to do with Sync?

I've had uBlock disappear from the main menu in mobile Firefox, but it was still accessible from the add-ons screen. I can get uBlock to reappear in the menu by force quitting Firefox.

It also happens to me. I assumed it's some bug or internal crash. However it seems to keep working even if it doesn't appear in the menu. It's just impossible to pick elements to hide if it's not in the menu.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#70

Meanwhile there’s an extension on there with our company name and logo (both trademarked) that might be stealing peoples data and Google have done nothing about it after many submissions of their trademark infringement form.

Legal demand letter time.
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