[geza]

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejected by their system after about 3-4 days) and I feel utterly helpless. It's only used by about 12,000 users so unlike PushBullet I probably don't have the visibility to get a human to intervene, so will be going the way of Kozmos most likely.

[panic]

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

[singron]

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

[prox]

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse.

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.

[Silhouette]

The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result.

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.

[dragonwriter]

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government.

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.

[foobarbazetc]

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing.

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

[artsyca]

This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment

[abbadadda]

Zomg good thing this is visible.

[ezoe]

s/these days/always/

Here, fixed it for you.

[babesh]

This feels like 1994 all over again. In 1994 you had one dominant software monopoly in Microsoft. Today you have several: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook with dominance in individual spheres of influence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[bufferoverflow]

In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.

[znpy]

It's time to switch to Firefox and advocate for Firefox usage.

[zb1plus]

That's very sad to hear, I've been an avid user of HabitLab. Thank you so much for developing this tool! I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Chromium fork with the HabitLab interventions integrated deeper into the browser? I think there's a lot of potential and interest for a productivity-oriented browser that helps stay focused and develop good time management skills.

[geza]

A Chromium fork is going to be a pain to maintain. My contingency plan if it gets removed from the Chrome store is to try to get it accepted into the Edge and Opera stores, and ask users to switch to either Edge or Opera (and provide sideloading instructions for those who want to stick to Chrome).

[thayne]

Good luck getting drm content to work on a chromium fork.

[hanklazard]

I'm really sorry to hear that--it looks like a useful extension and I'm sure you've put a lot of hard work into it.

Naive question to you and to other extension developers here ... how does Firefox do when it comes to this issue? Is it just that the market share is so much lower that it's not worth developing for FF? I ask this as a happy FF user on mac, linux, ios.

[geza]

I tried porting the extension over to Firefox when Firefox switched to WebExtensions, and at the time there were tons of incompatibilities, mostly with Firefox's Shadow DOM implementation (HabitLab is a huge and complicated codebase, porting it is non-trivial - I had an issue tracking it at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/issues/137 ). I'm sure it's a valid option for smaller extensions however. At the moment I'm trying to get it accepted on the Edge store, as Edge is much more compatible with Chrome extensions than Firefox.

[dbjorge]

I work for Microsoft on a moderately complex chromium extension. We've investigated porting it to Firefox (we've had a small but nonzero minority of users ask about it, and several of our engineers have a personal interest in it), but it's really hard to estimate ahead of time how much effort it's going to be. Most of the issues are not so bad to fix individually, it's just an unknown-length onion peeling exercise. It's especially challenging when a library/framework you use is impacted by a difference and its maintainers aren't motivated to improve compatibility; some examples of this we've run into include "Firefox's RegExp implementation doesn't support named capture groups" (but the library author doesn't want to make the code less readable by not using them) and "Firefox's auto-size behavior for extension popup UI (what you see when you click am extensions toolbar icon) sometimes sends spurious window resize events when the DOM is modified" (the UI control library we use has behavior to dismiss context menus on window resize, which this breaks).

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.

[harha]

While the notice probably comes from some automated system resembling authoritarian governments as described below, it looks like your extension would be undesirable to Google's business model and metrics they would want to optimize anyway. I hope you can find a different platform to run the extension, it seems more friendly than the screen time features in Apple.

I haven't used Chrome since I've left Google and would recommend everyone to move to an alternative non-Chrome-based browser for a more balanced ecosystem. All the bad behaviour can be avoided when companies actually need to look after retaining users and taking care of not so frequent cases and I hope better business practices can come up without the need for government intervention.

[notoriousjpg]

I used to feel impressed when someone told me they worked at Google. Now i just wonder if they're apart of the teams that make these horrendous decisions and force terrible UX on us and deprecate features that users love.

[nana-]

Make your extension available on Firefox

[viach]

> Some anonymized data will be sent to Stanford for research purposes. See our privacy policy for details.

Maybe this text on your front page is triggering someone at Google extensions department?

[axitanull]

When you are detained by the police, you don't have to do the guesswork of what you did wrong.

The police should/would tell you.

[lonelappde]

Is there a workaround for users? Old builds of Chromium?

[geza]

It works fine with the current versions of Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Edge), you'll just need to sideload it once it gets removed from the Chrome store. Alternatively, if/when I manage to get it accepted into the Edge store, you could switch to Edge.

[elkos]

Would be great if you ported HabitLab for Firefox