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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

I have published some of my extensions for the new Edge browser on their store [1], the submission experience was straightforward and pleasant, and the extensions were published in a couple of days after manual review. Updates were also reviewed and published in a timely manner.

More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chrome Web Store [2][3].

So I am happy that Microsoft has not only renewed their effort in this space, but they're also offering a decent alternative for developers who would rather not deal with Google.

[1] https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/category/Edge-Ext...

[2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63

[3] https://github.com/dessant/youtube-autoplay/issues/3

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Phrasing it as a dichotomy like that is pretty dishonest, especially how Firefox is twice as popular than Edge [1] and is free open source software that doesn't spy on you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

I think the situation invites that specific comparison because the new Edge is based on Chromium. I didn't read it as leaving out Firefox for any other reason.

OP didn't mention Safari or Brave either, don't be so hair-trigger looking for offense.

Microsoft is replicating the entire browser ecosystem, so developers and users who prefer Chromium are no longer bound to Google. Firefox is my browser of choice, and their reviewer team is wonderful, see my other [1] comment, though all of this is tangential to Firefox.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057859

Firefox has the same analytics and browser feedback settings enabled as Chromium, and both have options to disable them.

The dichotomy comes up because the new Edge supports Chrome extensions. So it's literally the same code being submitted to both stores, which makes it more of an apples-to-apples comparison.

Firefox and Safari are source compatible with chrome extensions too. Everyone copied Chrome's extension api.

Ryan Gosling thinks differently:

https://superanimo.s3.amazonaws.com/porting-firefox-extensio...

Because they need developers more than developers need them. If they become as dominant as Apple and Google in their respective spaces, expect your experience to degrade.

or put another way: when they become a target for bad actors to abuse extensions, expect the review process to be more difficult.

I don't think becoming a target for malicious actors is the reason for Chrome Web Store reviews being awful, see the threads I've linked to above and explore the rest of the links. Chrome Web Store reviewers are simply not properly trained and qualified to do this job, and the review process dictated by Google does not leave much room for improvement. Reviewers make an awful lot of mistakes and they usually do not listen to reason, the only thing that works is to document everything and make it public.

I've had some issues during Firefox extension reviews too, and Mozilla employees have usually changed their opinion after feedback. When they've made a mistake, sometimes they said they were sorry, which was a decent thing to do and it felt right. They talked and acted like human beings whom are capable of compassion and reasoning.

Exactly. Developers are going to submit apps to Google regardless of how bad the process is, so there’s no real incentive to improve the experience.

I don't know, I've seen plenty of abuse on the windows store. Being a default choice for tech illiterates makes it a juicy target

Microsoft has always been developer-first, even when they didn't need them, and even during the Ballmer era.

Google has never been about the developer experience, and is quite hostile to developers even when they need them. (See, e.g., Stadia.)

What is your definition of developer-first? My experience working at Microsoft in 2015 was the opposite of what you describe. They were too focused on supporting legacy MS that they couldn't innovate or find and keep talented developers in open source because they were forced to adopt tools and frameworks that were crap compared to standard open source development tools.

The only reason people went there usually was for the money and once they got enough to follow their passion, they left because none of them were passionate about Microsoft.

External rather than internal dev support.

We all know Microsoft has a lot more internal documentation than external, especially with Windows around that time.

One difference that stands out to me about Microsoft vs Google. Both are very heavy C++ shops. Both have invested in developing tools for enhancing developer productivity on their respective platforms (Windows and Linux). Yes, Linux is not a Google product (thank god) but it is what they build on.

Microsoft's C++ IDE and debugger are the gold standard for productivity and ease of use - everyone who writes native applications for Windows uses Visual Studio. You can try it out for free and the price per developer is very reasonable if you want to publish a paid product.

Google's C++ IDE and debugger are nonexistent. Whatever they've built is kept inside the Googleplex never to see the light of day. From time to time we see the occasional free software reimplementation of some facet of the beast (e.g. Kythe) but I haven't seen something catch on.

In fact, the biggest contributors to developer productivity on Linux have been Microsoft (with Visual Studio Code and the lsp protocol) and Apple (investing in clang led to the development of advanced C++ indexers which were impossible to write using gcc due to Stallman making a conscious decision to not allow it)

Of course there is a good reason for this - Microsoft and Apple make platforms. The easier they make software development, the more developers they get, which leads to more software being written, which leads to more users, which results in profit. Google on the other hand doesn't win by making development easy for others. They're themselves a third party and other developers are competition rather than partners. For Microsoft, the existence of developers outside the company using Microsoft's development tools to create software for Microsoft's platform is a win. For Google, the best case scenario is there being no developers outside Google.

Have you actually tried to use Visual Studio? It's an unusable piece of crap.

The navigation is nearly unusable. Don't focus the project navigation on a tree browser if you're not going to integrate it into the rest of the navigation workflow.

NuGet regularly fails silently to restore packages.

It uses a virtual filesystem that usually maps 1:1 to the actual project folder.. except files created outside of VS are completely invisible to it, unless manually added to the project.

The project/solution files are very verbose and aren't designed to be edited by humans.

The migration path from .NET Framework to .NET Core seems to be "create a new project, copy the files over manually, and copy over your old settings one by one".

Some of these have been fixed for new projects, but there is no option to migrate to the new structure. Except, again, starting over with a new one.

Euh, lol.

You are talking about the biggest architecture change of. Net in 30 years ( going cross platform) and they are still going to support VB 6, WPF,..

Visual studio is actually a very robust IDE. The issue you are mentioning is .net framework project files and if you copy files within or to Visual Studio it will be added. .net framework only wants to add files you want to deploy ( not perfect, but okay).

For migrating to. Net standard 2.0, remove assemblyinfo.cs and change the. Csproj file. You should manually add the Nugget packages again or change it to the new structure. The biggest issue is entity framework though, in a lot of projects. From. Net standard to . Net core is a lot easier.

Seems pretty reasonable to me, updating other things ( eg. Android) have caused more issues than this.

Ps. Navigating is mostly f12 of control+f12

As someone who uses visual studio + code literally every day, I'm not sure what you're referring to with most of these complaints.

The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.

The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle. You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks, or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].

As for running into bugs, they built bug/feature requests into the visual studio 2019 ide, or you can access it via the website [2]. They are usually very responsive, typically something within a couple of days.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57334018/visual-studio-2...

[1] open package manager console, type 'update-package -reinstall'.

[2] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com

> The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.

Project files are "bog standard" XML (except for all the weird magic, like variable resolution and conditionals), but solution files are some unholy VB-like abomination.

But regardless, that doesn't help much when the schema is clearly not designed for human editing (incredibly verbose, UUIDs everywhere for references, etc).

> The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle.

No idea how a GUI description language is supposed to help you here.

> You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks

Didn't work for me.

> or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].

Keep in mind that that command is free to update dependencies as it feels like.

I'm so completely not a Windows developer or a C++ developer, but seriously, the experience working with Visual Studio on Windows/C++ when I didn't really know what I was doing - but I had to do undocumented things (I needed to get Haskell to talk to some Windows apis, for which no bindings exist) - was incredible. Second to none. I'm half thinking about changing career direction it was so nice.

1. Navigation: subjective so gonna let that slide. 2. Downright bullshit. You are starting to whine. 3. Subjective but far from something that makes the IDE a "piece of crap" 4. You are starying to sound like you are in the wrong industry. 5. No. Change the .csproj and drop the AssemblyInfo.cs usually work for something that can actually be migrated. If you expect any project that targeted Windows to just migrate to cross platform using a NNF you are an idiot.

At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.

> 1. Navigation: subjective so gonna let that slide.

If you're going to pick a mode of navigation then at least commit to it. It's subjective whether or not any particular choice is good. The quality of the implementation, not so much.

> 2. Downright bullshit. You are starting to whine.

Sorry for wanting a package manager to... manage packages, I guess.

Or maybe it's configured wrong? I guess it's too much to expect two Microsoft tools to work well together..

> 3. Subjective but far from something that makes the IDE a "piece of crap"

Do you never edit your project files from outside the IDE?

> 4. You are starying to sound like you are in the wrong industry.

Compare a typical SBT build definition[0] or Cargo.toml[1] to a typical VS solution[2] or project[3]. Which would you feel the most confident about when modifying by hand?

(Hint: For me, it's definitely not the one that is full of autogenerated cartesian products.)

> 5. No. Change the .csproj and drop the AssemblyInfo.cs usually work for something that can actually be migrated.

So why couldn't Microsoft include a tool for that migration? That seems like table stakes for such a migration project. We're not exactly talking about 2to3[4] or rustfix[5] here...

> If you expect any project that targeted Windows to just migrate to cross platform using a NNF you are an idiot.

Amazing how Microsoft are completely unable to even get close to what the Wine and Mono people did years ago.

> At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.

Throw a dart and you'll find something. If you want the out-of-the-box live-in-your-IDE experience then JetBrains' stuff is miles better than VS. Personally I moved on to Spacemacs[6] after a few years each of VS and IntelliJ.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/teozkr/what-should-i-sing/blob/master/bui...

[1]: https://gitlab.com/teozkr/scankiosk/blob/master/scankiosk-ui...

[2]: https://github.com/getsentry/raven-csharp/blob/develop/src/S...

[3]: https://github.com/getsentry/raven-csharp/blob/develop/src/a...

[4]: https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/2to3.html

[5]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfix

[6]: https://www.spacemacs.org/

But Microsoft has a long history of providing good customer and developer support. Why would they change for just this one product?

Is this a different store from the "old" Edge?

The "old" Edge store was utterly mismanaged [0]. I'm glad they've improved if this one is different, but they definitely left a sour taste in my mouth.

[0] I required Native App Messaging and needed to include a 32 bit binary to read an SQLite database. The extension was rejected and was only told to wait while they worked on this feature (which was already in a tutorial I was following). Nobody ever contacted me back for over a year until the news broke that they were moving to Chromium.

>More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chrome Web Store

I suspect that would change if Edge gained significant market share. I think what happens is that as these platforms grow, they get targetted by spammers, malware, and scammers and consequently their processes harden and tolerances go down.

Since the extensions are identical to Chrome, they should piggyback on that store’s decisions. Or both should. That might ease some pressure and benefit everyone.

Wonder why...

Microsoft: developers, developers, developers, developers!

Google: advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers!

Google has for its entire history had strong ties to building a developer community. For instance Google Summer of Code [0] and here's a list of Google APIs with 179 current APIs [1].

[0] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

[1] https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer

Conveniently leaving out the hundreds of times that Google has randomly terminated APIs or entire products with minimal if any forewarning, or reduced API functionality or pricing without forewarning, and the complete and utter lack of support [edit] Google provides to developers who don't already have their own twitter following.

I like the idea of Google Developer Supper.

It's almost as if Google is a massive organization running hundreds of initiatives spanning decades, making it difficult to simplify things with a single description.

And yet one constant that connects all past Google projects: premature, without-warning shuttering of operations*

* not all operations, but enough for it to become a cliche

And Microsoft is a feisty startup with a focused product line?

No, Microsoft is the same. My comment doesn't imply that Microsoft is somehow simpler than Google. The point is that the two people above me are disagreeing because they're over-simplifying these complex entities.

And yet when I open Edge, I get a million ads for crappy tabloid news websites thrust in my face, while when I open Chrome I don't see any ads.

I just setup Edge a few minutes ago. There are two options "Inspirational" and "Focused" that show no crappy tabloid news websites and one that does - I didn't pick that one :)

Also, happy to report that 1password has an extension for Edge as well - that's awesome.

Only thing I'm missing is a dark mode extension. I don't trust the somewhat sketchy ones that I see so far on the store.

If you enable dark mode in your Windows settings, you can just use the built in browser dark mode. This is also a setting in CSS to enable dark mode when this is enabled. Last, you can install extensions from the Chrome Store.

You can also install extensions from the Chrome Web Store in Edge, there's a switch to enable the feature on the extension management page.

> I just setup Edge a few minutes ago. There are two options "Inspirational" and "Focused" that show no crappy tabloid news websites and one that does - I didn't pick that one :)

I chose focused. It's a nice option.

Too bad it doesn't respect your search engine preferences, because any searches you do with it seem to always go to Bing, regardless of what address-bar search engine you have selected.

The tabloid you can further deactivate under the gear of the new tab

I believe this may also be dependent on whether you're on a personal machine or enterprise network. My Edge start page has a gear with the Page Layout options (Focused, Inspirational, Informative) and also radio buttons for Page Content with a choice between Office365 and Microsoft News. My default displayed Office365 (recent documents opened list) without any of the MS News agg tiles.

Chrome android features lots of tabloid ad crap in its home page.

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