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Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

I have a side-project that is partially a browser extension. I use a single codebase for both Firefox and Chrome.

Even with my trivial side-project and a grand total of two releases so far, Google ar itrarily rejected one release for being "spammy" when there was literally a 5 line diff between it and the previous release. Thankfully just finding the depreciated dashboard and uploading an icon (the "new dashboard" doesn't have this feature yet apparently) got it through after resubmitting it.

It feels like they've set themselves as gatekeepers of Chrome extensions (Windows users can only install from the "store") but they aren't actually interested in doing the job even though you pay an admin fee for the privilege of developing a free extension for their browser.

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Your best course of action is to drop chrome support, and make your extension as good as possible and make a point of marketing that it's firefox only. Most won't do it due to worrying about market share, but alas IMO it's the best option available

I use Firefox personally and originally made the thing for myself. I added Chrome support because Chrome is much more popular (not far from ten times more popular these days :() and people I would like to use this, eg friends and family, mostly use Chrome.

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).

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to promote Firefox to your friends and family as "simply the better choice" irrespective of your own interests.

When Chrome was better, I suggested friends and family use Chrome. Now I think most people would benefit from using Firefox as their primary driver.

Are you including the change cost here, which will be many times higher for most of the population vs. HN? Even if I thought that Firefox was a better choice, I'd recommend to my friends and family to keep using whatever they are using unless they have to switch for some reason.

What, precisely, is the cost?

Lazy web devs that only test in Chrome and maybe safari that constantly break things in other browsers. I don't mind sending the angry support email and using chrome for a single task here and there but others might.

I never used Chrome and never encountered a website that didn't work on Firefox. I think this concern is a bit overblown.

Bank of America didn't work for the better part of last year. Chase Rewards are currently broken since last week. Its easy to drop small sites that don't test but my experience has been they actually bother testing and it's the major sites that actually have problems.

I've had Firefox fail to work properly on the sites of Slashdot, Amazon, Newegg, Chase, BoA, GE, Walmart, the IRS, PennDOT, Mozilla's own org site, WaPo, NPR, Fox, Disney, and a whole host of others.

Effort, time, unlearning workflows and re-learning them in Firefox, etc. Switching costs would probably have been a better term to use.

I got my retired mother to switch to Firefox without her hardly noticing the difference. And she's happier now that she gets fewer ads.

I think we as developers overestimate the resistance to switching.

I think this is because programmers have very specific and personalized workflows for all the tools they use so they assume other people are the same way when in reality a browser for most people is just a tool to get what they want.

>make a point of marketing that it's firefox only.

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.

Man, I haven't updated my extension for years because it's already feature complete (at least for my use case) and at this point I'm afraid when I push an update, Google would outright ban it because the extension requires full access to all sites and tabs (it's an automatic tab suspension extension).

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