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

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

#761

Post by thayne »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #736
shkkmo wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you say "personal attacks aren't allowed", they'll say "but I wasn't attacking him personally, I just suggested that anyone who says [the thing he said] should consider getting evaluated by a doctor for mental retardation." 1) That pretty clearly qualifies as a personal attack 2) There is a significant difference between a forum and a business critical software distribution platform.

> That pretty clearly qualifies as a personal attack Okay, let's take the obscurity up one level: I used to moderate a very small internet forum, where there was one user who had certain mannerisms in his writing. I also had reason to suspect this user was mildly suicidal. A troll began to mimic these mannerisms as a way to make fun of that user, and talk about how horrible their life was. The troll wasn't overt abou…

It sounds like this case would comply with the proposed rules to me. You informed the bad actor of what he was doing wrong, the behaviour was correctable, and he continued to exhibit said bad behaviour, so you banned him.

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

#762

Post by bmj »

kire456 wrote: post #721
skrebbel wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you might think, "Ah-ha, desktop apps!" But the OS vendor can casually destroy you there. Casually? The amount of effort and goodwill, say, Microsoft would need to spend to prevent me from installing $PROGRAM on my computer is significantly higher than the amount of non-effort a single extension reviewer would need to expend to click "no" arbitrarily because they are having a bad day. How would Microsoft do it?…

The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right? The Old New Thing[0] is full of stories of apps that exploited undocumented implementation details of the OS, and were surprised that those aspects were in fact changed in a later OS version. To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work…

This strikes me as a different class of problem. Of course software developers are at the mercy of other software and hardware, and have been since the days of yore. And even in that case, you could still potentially debug the issue.

This is a different class of problem. In this case, a gatekeeper is asking you to use their service to distribute software through their channel, and that channel is governed by vague rules that may, in fact, be enforced on a whim. Further, the gatekeeper isn't being clear with the rules, and why you may have run afoul of them.

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

#763

Post by the_jeremy »

SahAssar wrote: post #85
the_jeremy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not firefox?

I use firefox. The parent comment said they didn't trust firefox or chrome.

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

#764

Post by thejynxed »

mirimir wrote: post #593
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This gets you banned.

Is that really true?

Only years later, as in the case of a certain Vietnamese hacking group that did exactly this starting at the end of 2015 and didn't have their apps yanked until Nov & Dec of 2019 and another batch located & yanked only last month, well after any and all damage was already done to those who used the apps.

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

#765

Post by thejynxed »

hedora wrote: post #520
friedman23 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uh, yikes Agreed I wish we could send everyone that thinks this kind of response from a megacorporation is good to a kafkaesque alternate universe.

> kafkaesque alternate universe You can sleep well tonight knowing a few of them will attempt to build a house in California.

They've already done that in Palo Alto from what I understand.

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

#766

Post by raister »

fluffything wrote: post #745
raister wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year, my resolution was to start reducing my dependency on Google products. I installed Firefox and deleted Chrome. Then I downloaded a file size manager and remove all files I haven't open in past 5 years, deleting from GDrive. THe same with GDocs. All emails larger than 1Mb were checked if they needed to persist. I end up unsubscribing from the 100Gb service from Google, my inbox has 6Gb, I deleted the Picasa…

> I installed Firefox and deleted Chrome You know that Firefox is Google right? Like, literally, Google is the main company paying Firefox's developers, and if they don't do what Google says, Google can just cut the funding, and they all end up unemployed, right ? Of course, to avoid a monopoly, Google would need to fund a different browser instead, but still, people have families to feed. If you want to cut dependen…

> Firefox is Google

Then we're doomed...

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

#767

Post by thejynxed »

tony101 wrote: post #490
seanwilson wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you realistically avoid this for certain products though? For mobile for example, you've got the iOS and Android store policies to go through, the iOS and Android SDKs, and whatever restrictions Safari (e.g. no proper PWAs) and Chrome have. Not everything can be a website that just needs basic browser capabilities.

At least Android allows sideloading without using the Play Store. Chrome used to allow this, and I believe they've made it much more difficult.

I believe you can only do it on the dev channel now and it still makes a fuss.

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

#768

Post by thayne »

bostonpete wrote: post #753
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was ready to get behind this line of reasoning, but then I thought about e.g. comment sections. Anyone who has moderated a forum will know that trolls find every possible way to walk right up to the line without technically crossing it. If you say "personal attacks aren't allowed", they'll say "I wasn't attacking him personally, I just suggested that anyone who says [the thing he said] should consider getting evalu…

Yeah, this is the issue. They're not going to catch every dirty thing extensions (perhaps unwittingly) do. If they are able to detect one or more problems with an extension, there's a good chance that there are other problems that were undetected. Forcing extension authors to go back and think about what they could be doing better rather than just telling them the minimal set of changes that are needed seems like it…

There should at least be some appeals process that involves a human then. In this case they fixed legitimate cases where they had too many permissions (including removing some functionality), and were still rejected. What if the reason they were flagged was because of a legitimate usage of a permission that the automated (or manual) system wasn't aware of? At the very least there should be a way for a flagged extension author to go through a process where they explain why they need each permission they request, and if that is they are still rejected, told why their explanation wasn't good enough.

This is especially important given google's market power in the browser industry. What if the extension is from Google's competitor? Google could ban the extension without a legitimate reason to hurt their competition.

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

#769

Post by core-questions »

tornato7 wrote: post #634
core-questions wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop using their browser, stop using their search. The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think). They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _goo…

What should I use for search? I tried switching to DDG for a month but I kept finding myself manually typing in Google.com to make the more obscure searches.

If you have all the adblockers and stuff, and open a fresh private browser, nothing wrong with taking advantage of Google's still-superior search for finding things.

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

#770

Post by fluffything »

wadkar wrote: post #757
mplanchard wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money that Mozilla makes from Google comes primarily from setting Google as the default search engine in Firefox. You can see lots more details on this here (2016 numbers): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ I think stating that Google controls Firefox is vastly overstating the degree of influence.

Is it reasonable to assume that bing will be more than happy to become the default should google leave any space on the table?

I'm pretty sure a lot of companies would pay a lot of money for that.
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