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Comment by meraku | Hacker News Reader

Another happy PushBullet user here. Extremely useful for receiving text messages from my phone while on my laptop, especially for web apps that insist on sending security codes that way instead of TOTP.

This sort of behavior from Google really is infuriating. How they can just decide to boot an app from the Chrome Store that is installed by over a million users is mind-boggling.

It's a pity that Chrome doesn't allow extensions to be installed from the new Edge store, like Microsoft allow Edge to install extensions from the Chrome store. With both built on Chromium, that could've potentially been a workaround (though you may want to consider adding this extension to the Edge store anyway).

Hopefully someone from Google will see this and stop the madness or be able to provide more details on exactly what needs to be done, though I wouldn't bet on it.

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I switched to Edge chromium when the first production release came out and I am extremely happy. I use all my extensions including unlock origin straight from chrome Web store and it feels a bit snappier than chrome itself.

> It's a pity that Chrome doesn't allow extensions to be installed from the new Edge store

Why would anyone want to do that? What's a real pity is that they make every effort to block users from installing their own extensions. App stores are terrible.

How does Chrome prevent people from installing their own extensions? Download-and-unpack still works fine, last I checked.

No, they make every effort to ensure that installing extensions outside the store is annoying so that you can't push your malware by just having users download and install it. This kind of malware plagued Firefox for years until they made extension signing mandatory

If I am in a position to install random shit into Firefox I am also in a position to just modify Firefox, so that doesn't accomplish anything at all except remove functionality from users.

Except most targets won't modify their Firefox.

I think I am not understanding your use of the word "target" here, as I would have expected that to be the person being targeted by the malware install, but that person isn't someone who by definition even knows what is going on: it is the attacker who is choosing to install something into Firefox without the express knowledge of the target, and so it is the attacker whom I am noting is able to choose to instead modify Firefox; if the target were making the decision to install the extension then clearly they should be allowed to do whatever they legitimately want to do with their software.

It looks like they have a Firefox version of the extension.

Makes me wonder how much of this is motivated by Googles Messages App now having a web interface...

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