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Comment by flanbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

TL:DR; because Firefox adopted the Web Extensions format and even links chrome.* to the same browser.* api, so all you need to do is change a couple of things in your manifest.json and you're good to go.

What they don't say how long it takes for Firefox to approve your extension. I submitted an extension and I it took almost 3 months to get approved. I got put in a queue of about 300 at the time and the queue moved very slow. I think this is because an actual person is reviewing the extension and not some automated tool (I assume, maybe that live person is using an automated tool and then hand-checking the results)

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3 months seems long. We ported our Copyfish extension to Firefox recently, and the approval process took only ~10 days. I think first feedback took about a week. The reviewer replied with constructive feedback and we had to change a few small things. Then it took another 1-2 days for the final approval. So yes, there is a real human being behind it. Or some super-AI ;)

Maybe the issue is that GP posted so many as once the they got flagged as possibly being spam/malicious/other desirable thing and therefore got put into a manual-verification bucket?

There's some criteria by which it just goes through without human code review. I don't know what the exact criteria are, but I imagine it's something like if your extension never connects to the internet and doesn't interact with webpages and so on, it's basically impossible for it to be malicious, so gets a pass. But otherwise, yeah, there is someone who actually reads the code. They probably use automated tools as well, but then in addition.

Did you submit a webextension or a legacy extension?

It was a brand new Web Extension version. I had no interest in making FF extensions in their old format (just didn't want to take the time to learn it). But when they adopted Web Extensions I was able to easily port a Chrome extension over to it.

Absolutely correct. Even if you just change one line of code it will take weeks to get approved. Totally unacceptable. Chrome approval process is measured in minutes.

Due to this and ff terrible market share there is little reason to develop for ff.

Moz has killed ff with their own incompetence.

Because we all know here that Google's automated review is perfect both in Chrome Web Store and in Google Play Store and that their respective support (the same?) is top notch.

Terrible market share? In many first world countries, 30-40% of desktop browsing market are still running Firefox.

The only markets where Firefox is below 25% are those where addons in competing browsers don't exist at all: on mobile.

Seeing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers chrome seems to dig other browsers.

That is including mobile. On Desktop, Firefox is still a lot larger, although Chrome has been growing, too.

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