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

I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure,

I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs.

Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.

It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

Here, fixed it for you.

The most painful incompatibility I've read about was in the Bitwarden extension, which basically doesn't support most operations in Firefox private windows because Firefox intentionally doesn't support getBackgroundPage() from there, and Bitwarden architected their extension to use that for all IPC between their frontend and backend layers. You can avoid that incompatibility by using runtime.sendMessage for that purpose, but they didn't know that at the time they wrote it (there's a warning about it in the MDN docs for getBackgroundPage now, but that warning wasn't there at the time). We happened to have gotten lucky in our extension in that we use sendMessage for the same purpose, but we certainly didn't know about that incompatibility at the time we were making the architectural decision.

Beyond just making it work, our team would also want to be able to automate regression tests against Firefox if we were to officially support it. For a long time, selenium was the most realistic option for that, but we switched away from selenium to puppeteer a year ago due to reliability issues with the former. Now that Firefox support in puppeteer is very recently starting to stabilize, we're hopeful we'd be able to use that, but we haven't tried it yet and it's new enough that we wouldn't expect it to be fully compatible/stable yet.

The police should/would tell you.

Exactly. This is basically a replay of the way Microsoft treated developers of third-party Windows programs in the 1990s. Only the time scale was different; you typically had at least a few years before MS either integrated your killer feature into Windows, or changed something about the Windows internals that broke your program, either way killing your business.

At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?

Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.

Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:

* Features that compete with Android * Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet * Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers * Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls

There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.

By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).

Isn't one of the 'main' criteria around anti-trust how a company impacts the consumer ? this sort of thing sounds harmful to the consumer (fewer choices, actively taking down products consumers use, etc.)

Until Firefox or Edge catches up in both performance and implementation compatibility to make Chrome-first sites work, extension support isn't incentivized

I don’t use Google extensions on Chrome, and increasingly I don’t use Chrome.

Paying users seem to be part productivity nerds who maybe aren't technical enough to grok installing from the repo, and part people who just choose to pay for the automatic upgrades or to support the developer. Also, lots of users are web gamers who use it for in-game automation.

I wrote a post about it 1 week after monetizing, if you're curious: https://critter.blog/2020/01/14/week-1-of-monetizing-my-chro...

Would you feel dead inside if your tool helped developers keep their projects online? Sounds rewarding to fight the big guy and keep cool projects online.

This is a great but only a temporary solution. Firefox is taking jabs at extensions not on its recommended list with slightly scary warnings.

Firefox as a privacy focused browser should give users the ability to limit permission or sites extension can run on - including click to run option.

Without this, they'll soon go the way of chrome.

Heck Chrome started locking down extensions when they started catering courting enterprises. And they included the ability to make extensions uninstallable.

Bad actors took advantage of it, forcing chrome to tighten things further until extensions could only be installed from the store.

I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozilla is not exactly streets ahead, but at least they didn't charge me and they seem to be fairer and more helpful to extension developers (they have a "self-distribution" mode with relaxed oversight I used while in private alpha, and their tools and docs are better).

And he did offer them a solution: $30,000 dollars, to which they promptly - albeit indirectly - replied with fuck you.

You're lucky you were treated as nicely as you were. It could have been a whole lot worse.

Lessons learned:

1. Hire an attorney when you get a takedown notice if you think you are likely to decline, and seek counsel before responding.

2. Telling people "fuck you" doesn't get you anywhere, and it doesn't matter how impolite or wrong you think the other person is.

So while his "likeability" is completely irrelevant, how else would we even hear about these issues if he didn't make a big fuss about it? I think that also might explain why we heard of this story twice from the same developer. The truth is people face similar issues every day but no one hears about it. I'm glad that some people kick up a lot of dust and make the issue visible to everyone.

Per my anecdotal experience, they are really good at choosing the outcome that benefits them the most/harms them the least - which wouldn't upset me since most companies do this, but it's Npm's "we're here for the community" type of fake attitude that has always bothered me.

You can't just trademark 3 letters in a way so that nobody else can use them. In fact there's hundreds of trademarks that are the letters "kik" in various logos[1].

What they trademarked is a bunch of specific logos containing those letters. Doesn't prevent other people from also using those 3 letters in some other way.

In fact when he wrote "kik", my first thought was the he was talking about the German textile discount store - which is the first result for me when I google those letters.

[1]: https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=kik

I'm shocked to see that something like this could happen on npm - where a single threat of getting lawyers involved can get your package transferred away from you. It really wants to make me not publish anything on npm too actually.

They removed that permission to limit it to only Pushbullet, and then were able to get back on.

I'm not saying there couldn't have been more hand-holding - but it wasn't exactly like it wasn't for a fairly egregious security breach.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in any Chrome/Android/Store team, or anything even vaguely related to that - this is purely my own opinion).

OK, so the is more to it than that and he did have a genuine grievance (I forgot exactly what) bit in dealing with that he caused a pile collateral damage for innocent bystanders.

(Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming which brings us back to the broken system)

I have a friend who encountered a similar scenario with a company claiming trademark on a name. In their case they simply changed the package name. It was frustrating but it meant everybody was able to move on without any drama. Subsequently, as far as I'm aware, the trademark holder has never even published a package under the original name. So I suppose that makes it doubly irritating, but such is life.

I think your suggestion would have neatly avoided a lot of these kinds of issues in the first place.

Granted, all I know of the author is based on what I've seen of his past behaviour. That does make me a little sceptical that his account of events represents the sum totality of truth around the situation. I don't believe that's an unreasonable perspective.

It does not mean the account is false, or that I lack sympathy for him[1], or that I'm unwilling to see or understand his point of view. What I was concerned by is that in the comments I was seeing nothing but unalloyed support, which I did not think was warranted based on what we know. I think I've been pretty clear about that.

I also think it's a shame that he's chosen to yank the extension, but that's obviously his choice and I can understand why he made it.

[1] Different context entirely but I've had my own issues with Google's algorithms, along with the sense of being left in the dark about why. I made some, actually useful, changes but I've still no idea if those are the reason the issues were resolved. Regardless, I'm glad that they have been resolved.

With Google's bot approach that can never happen. The only way to escalate issues is to be famous and write a blog post or tweet about it.

Also, I bet no one think all will be well, without KI, but it will be better dealing with incompetent, overworked and underpaid call workers, than dealing with a "smart" KI, with you cannot talk at all. In the first case there is at least the hope, that someone escalates the problem to someone with more knowledge who can finally solve your problem.

It's getting more common, too. Just the other day I found out that posting links in a youtube comment makes the comment invisible to everyone else. In hindsight, disallowing links is almost certainly a good policy and it's easy to understand and appreciate why it was put in place, but why the gaslighting? Just pop up a box explaining that links aren't allowed. The gaslighting isn't going to fool spammers for long enough to be a meaningful deterrent, but it is going to trip up legitimate users enough to meaningfully degrade their experience.

Time to visit my bitwarden and port another account off gmail (my late new-years resolution is to port an account off gmail every time I get myself worked up about something google did -- funnel the useless frustration into something worthwhile.)

If you need to depend of them for a specific service, don't. Go with an actual business that cares and have the focus on what's important, and more importantly a customer service that listens.

I went with a dedicated VoIP provider, and the service has been excellent

In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.

What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.

This went unsolved for years.

Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.

Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.

The real tragedy is that we decided to let corporations grow so big that they can say "fuck you" to courts and people alike with no repercussions. Twitter is famous for this, ever tried to appeal a ban?

Yep, Google is certainly protecting us from companies that do that.

We do keep giving power to some system because they "protect us" (Google and Apple in 2010) but there's always a chance that they'll stop caring once they don't need your support anymore.

Microsoft is also trying to buy our support by being benevolent, I wonder how long and if that will last.

This story is about infra, but it applies just as much for product.

The VP made a boatload in a bonus for outsourcing a major group with expensive Seattle engineers and offshoring it. Then the company paid millions to the FCC in fines for the fuck up. He kept his job.

Saw this cycle repeated all over, VP replacing expensive hundreds of millions in telecom equipment then go working for that vendor as a VP for them cough nortel cough...

Shit kept moving along, saw VP's back in the day push for the expensive per minute charges on low income phones while allowing the cheapest rates or inclusive long distance for normal users. The costs to keep the extra expensive billing and bad press of gouging the poor was ignored util it made the news. Shrug, change policy, nothing to see here.

Google is losing Joe Rogan due to censorship, while Google is running off their most watched creators due to guest censorship. Theres even people making plugins to get around googles censorship (msm channel blacklist, pockettube, etc).

The whole control angle of companies strangles customers and developers to create new platforms, bad mangament is a great opportunity for startups to take on these issues and grow into major companies. Spotify is just the modern day Napster. Bitchute is a wayward home for censored conversations. Paypal decided to ban people for politics and now dozens of companies are biting into their market, Square/Stripe etc.

People are tired of being controlled by FANNG companies, nextdoor took off due to facebook, companies are trying to keep the afloat with the largest consumer base, but once the market is shattered with fleeing/banned users and customers, new companies will pop up. Myspace tried to control the market, facebook took over, now facebook controls what you see in your feed, and people flee, so facebook buys up the startups people flee too.

Tiny companies fill the need, we just need to make sure they get funded to continue and grow, crowd sourcing is one area that helps.

I'm loving that hackers and programmers who hate being told what to do and how to act, are coding and design ways around this problem. Chrome extensions is a good idea, but soon google will ban them, Dissenter as an example. When chrome is too controlling people flee to the next browser. Look at how many browsers there are now doing what Google is lacking.

I cant wait to see what people build to rebel against "the system", and theres now methods to fund them, the future looks great. Everyone keeps talking about the same issues, as if its an accepted fact, then someone comes along and builds a platform/app/extension that fixes it.

And people move on...

I wonder what both AWS and Azure have that google does not???

Same with me. If I lost my Twitter account, I could rebuild it -- my _actual_ following at the time had more to do with my blog and RSS (miss those days :( ); however, it shows that you can't really trust that an account is yours or that as long as you follow rules, you get to keep using the site. Or that you'll get a "fair trial" when you're accused of breaking rules.

It doesn't help that these companies also punish you for getting accused when they _do_ have manual review. One of my photos on FB got mistakenly flagged, reviewed and approved that it's fine, and I still had a 7-day ban from posting/commenting. Youtube has that 3 strikes rule or whatever where if you get accused 3 times or more of copyright infringement (even if false and retracted), you lose monetization.

I'm the person building it, so please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for the tag. Looks like the author's core issue is (understandably) with the construction of the system itself. I'm not sure what I can do here other than listen and reiterate that we are trying to work to address these issues.

- https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1264331488029376513

A month ago he said:

For context, we're currently planning to create a team that will respond to escalations with more meaningful information about a rejection.

- https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-exte...

But the situation only appears to be getting worse and no one at Google appears to care enough to do anything about it.

I have an extension that is once again in rejection form mail purgatory and it makes me want to take my extensions off of the Google Chrome Web Store as well.

1. When (not "if") Google kills UBO 2. How Chrome's market share doesn't drop

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.

As for YouTube Music, it supports background play only if you subscribe, like regular YouTube.

I've had the exact opposite observation here. There are few places on the Internet I see Google get more consistently browbeaten and held to account for its mistakes and abuses than on HN. This has been the case for at least the past six or eight years or more. Threads on Google here are very rarely laudatory; they typically make the front page because of bad things.

HN comments tilt toward overwhelmingly disliking Goliath and favoring David. You see this in most Intel v AMD threads from the past decade. You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle. Intel having an inferior product now doesn't explain the visceral response, it's something deeper psychologically, it's a revulsion of big tech broadly. It's mostly just a matter of rooting for the underdog and against big tech. The same thing is common re Amazon and Facebook here (increasingly Apple as well, which has lost a lot of its favor on HN). Microsoft is slightly in favor by contrast, they took a very long big tech lashing previously and people like a comeback story (their open source olive branches help a lot).

Pretty typical, forever repeating psychology. Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.