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Eric Lawrence 🎻 on Twitter: "Most extensions are only money-adjacent-- They...

 2 years ago
source link: https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1088108732372930561
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The challenge with browsers and extensions is the same problem with pretty much all software: economics. Software isn't free, and developing it costs time and often money.
Browsers themselves have a money spigot: Search engine revenue ($110M USD per % of marketshare, if Firefox's numbers are any guide).

Most extensions are only money-adjacent-- They have the technical ability to do things that hijack revenue (redirect searches, show their own ads, camp on affiliate codes, etc). But they're generally not supposed to do these things.

Users won't (in large), pay for them directly.

Replying to

So, what to do?

Generally, you end up trying to find something that nets revenue without pissing anyone off too bad. And those things are often going to annoy or horrify users.

Earlier this year, I shared the tale of the most popular mouse gestures extension on the web store. (I love mouse gestures). It was so good, I knew that it must be monetizing somehow. So I used the great CRX Viewer to look into it...

...Turns out, the extension would watch all of your navigations and send the contents of virtually every form field off to some server in China.

Now, ostensibly, this data was used to improve the extension's ability to "do the right thing" for a given site/gesture. But...


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