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Comment by bobwaycott | Hacker News Reader

Shiiit. Brilliant. I am the type who keeps windows of tabs upon windows of tabs open forever, throughout a project or complicated task for weeks at a time, specifically because I make windows the container of purpose, and hate trying to deal with folders of bookmarks. This is fantastic.

Is it forever Chrome-only? Any chance of a Safari extension?

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That sounds like a pretty brutal workflow. Freezetab would be great for your use case, so I'm glad you like it.

I definitely plan on expanding availability to Firefox and Opera in the short-term (and eventually Edge), because porting Chrome extensions to those platforms is pretty straight forward.

Safari on the other hand is a little bit more challenging. Most browsers implement extensions as plain HTML, CSS, and Javscript — they're essentially just websites. Safari requires developers to integrate native Swift and Objective C code into extensions, which means I might have to do a partial rewrite (and learn Swift or Obj C) to target Safari.

You also have to pay a 99 dollar annual fee to maintain a presence in the Safari Extension Gallery, which is somewhat exorbitant for a free extension. If users install the Safari extension directly from my website instead of the extension gallery, then they'll miss out on auto updates.

Thanks for the reply! Nice to hear your thoughts on it. I’ll definitely give it a go and see if it can make me switch to chrome. Great work! :)

Waiting for Firefox edition... :-)

I didn't forget about FF users, a Firefox version is on its way :).

Great extension. I'm also notorious for keeping tens of windows open only to manage my tabs. FreezeTab would be a life/time saver.

I just emailed asking for Opera support. I recommend you create an email-list for alerting about updates and supported versions.

Do you mind elaborating about the business model around browser-extension building? In your case, is it merely for advertising your software development skills or is there anything else behind it?

Thanks for FreezeTab. ;-)

I'm glad you like it Vlad. :)

I saw your email, and I'll personally send you an email when an Opera version is available. Given that Opera is just a fork of Chromium, you can actually install most Chrome extensions directly from the Chrome Webstore[1], although that's just a temporary fix. I plan on fully supporting Opera in the near future.

As to the business model, I certainly considered monetization while building the product, but my initial concern was just solving my own problem and getting Freezetab into the hands of users. Given how successful the launch was (it's the #1 product on Producthunt today[2]) I'm actively exploring monetization strategies.

Given how many requests there are for cross-platform availability, I think I'll set up an email list to notify everyone when it's available for Firefox and Opera. I'll update this thread accordingly.

[1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-install-google-chrome-ex...

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/freezetab

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