[HN Gopher] Things I wish I knew before making a paid extension ...
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Things I wish I knew before making a paid extension (2019)
Author : luu
Score : 32 points
Date : 2020-05-22 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amie-chen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amie-chen.com)
| mastermojo wrote:
| YC W19 Sapling here. We have a freemium browser extension that
| acts as a grammar checker. Couple thoughts below:
|
| 1. Source code. You are allowed to minify source code. Chrome
| actually recommends minifying source to improve performance. If
| you require certain permissions you'll have to submit un-minified
| source for security review.
|
| 2. Cloud/subscription based models are the way to go if piracy is
| an issue, but it doesn't make sense for all products. Licensing
| hasn't been an issue for Sapling fortunately because the "brains"
| of our app are in the cloud. I know hacker news is very privacy
| conscious but our language models are too large to run on a
| user's end machine right now. Spier Pro seems like a useful web-
| scraping helper. People who can pirate a chrome extension
| probably can probably run xpath scripts or a free xpath testing
| extension themselves so if I were Amy I wouldn't worry _too_ much
| about piracy.
|
| 3. Forked Code. There should be no reason to do it. Firefox and
| Edge have done a lot of work to support most of the chrome apis.
| You can handle minor edge cases build time with a variable
| toggle. Keep the same manifest, even. Browsers are good about
| ignoring keywords in the manifest they don't recognize. My
| recommendation is to pretend they are the same platform until you
| find bugs/issues and hard code around them. Theres a handful but
| it's very manageable.
|
| [0] https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-
| extensi...
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37649620/does-chrome-
| mar...
|
| [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-
| ons/Web...
| AlexITC wrote:
| > 3. Forked Code. There should be no reason to do it
|
| The actual problem is that some APIs are different, for
| example, in Chrome the notifications has a richer set of
| options but you need to be careful to not use the ones not
| supported by Firefox.
|
| > Keep the same manifest
|
| Actually, it depends on which options you use, for example,
| i18n placeholders aren't supported in Firefox while they are in
| Chrome, in Edge, the manifest is drastically different.
| diob wrote:
| I've had some extensions that were approved, had no changes,
| then suddenly disapproved because someone on the chrome team
| decided to re-review it and didn't understand webpack /
| minification.
|
| I've been so busy I haven't bothered to go try and "fix" the
| extensions. These are OSS extensions, nothing paid, so I all
| the code is available for the reviewer to read by the way.
| mastermojo wrote:
| Yea, I've seen some some stories around Chrome review
| problems, most recently around pushbullet. I think it the
| review outcome depends a little bit on a mixture of reviewer
| and the permissions required. The more permissions an
| extension asks for the longer the review process, and
| unfortunately some false positive flags do happen now and
| then.
| weaksauce wrote:
| Browser vs chrome point is moot. Both namespaces exists in
| Firefox and there's a polyfill to bring the browser namespace
| into chrome if you want to use promises over function callbacks.
| https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill
| AlexITC wrote:
| As you said, the namespace is not a problem but some APIs
| definitely are, for example, in Chrome the notifications has a
| richer set of options but you need to be careful to not use the
| ones not supported by Firefox.
| quwert95 wrote:
| These are great points. I'd like to add some more to them:
|
| On minified source code, Extensions/Add-Ons are allowed to be
| deployed with minified source code as long as you provide the
| unminified versions to Google/Mozilla during review time.
|
| On chrome vs. browser namespaces, a quick 'let chrome = browser;'
| can help you keep the diffs small between versions. I have yet to
| find a complete solution to fixing 'forked code' between
| Google/Mozilla Extensions/Add-Ons.
|
| Also, storage mechanisms between browsers using the same
| extension code can be completely different. Beware if you're
| using caches, navigator.storage, and storage.local.
|
| Finally, extensions don't consider themselves secure, depending
| on the browser. moz-extension:// is not considered secure for
| cache access, whereas chrome-extension:// is.
|
| There lots of little 'gotchas' like these when developing browser
| extensions. :)
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > as long as you provide the unminified versions to
| Google/Mozilla during review time.
|
| I'm curious how they could know that the source code is the
| same
| weaksauce wrote:
| They ask for the minification command that was used as well I
| believe.
| AlexITC wrote:
| Firefox asks you to provide the source and the instructions
| to get the same build you are submitting to the store.
| [deleted]
| AlexITC wrote:
| > as long as you provide the unminified versions to
| Google/Mozilla during review time.
|
| I have been publishing extensions for a while and never found
| Google asking me for the source code, is there any hidden
| option to submit it?
|
| Another detail I have missed is release notes, Firefox is
| supposed to provide those but I have never been able to add
| them, Chrome doesn't seem to display them but I have got my
| submission rejected just after "improving" the description.
|
| > On chrome vs. browser namespaces, a quick 'let chrome =
| browser;' can help you keep the diffs small between versions. I
| have yet to find a complete solution to fixing 'forked code'
| between Google/Mozilla Extensions/Add-Ons.
|
| Firefox actually supports the chrome namespace but you need to
| be careful as some other APIs are different, for example, in
| Chrome the notifications has a richer set of options but you
| need to be careful to not use the ones not supported by
| Firefox.
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