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Comment by geza | Hacker News Reader

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejected by their system after about 3-4 days) and I feel utterly helpless. It's only used by about 12,000 users so unlike PushBullet I probably don't have the visibility to get a human to intervene, so will be going the way of Kozmos most likely.

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Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true.

I was part of a student association when I was an university student.

Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube.

One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why.

We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal.

In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces.

Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing.

You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).

The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result.

I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs.

Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government.

It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.

To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.

And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

I'm serious.

Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

That would be a very wrong move. I'm serious.

This unreliability that comes from agency of the individual compute nodes has some very important benefits: the system is much more resistant to bugs in code[0], and much more humane. Software, as it is today, doesn't understand morality. That's e.g. you wouldn't want to automate away judges in the justice system - the law is code, but it's buggy, and isn't complete enough to handle all cases in all contexts. You need case-by-case judgements, and that's why it's good to have human bureaucrats who can independently think and override the system as needed. Otherwise, the system would just grind people that fell into it.

[0] - Like, "you have to deliver document X before 14th to get something done, but the document is only available from 23rd". Happened to me during university, where some scolarship depended on a government document that you could procure only well after deadline. Of course, the secretary at the university knew this and let you fill in incomplete application; she'd wait for the whole allowed processing time, then send you a letter asking you to bring in missing documents and giving you 14 extra days. Given that this was a bug at an intersection of two bureaucratic systems, if this was software, it would likely go undetected for a while, until someone started to wonder why nobody is applying for scolarships anymore.

I'm just going to hook up on your example of the document and the deadline, and state the following: You're assuming a (very) pessimistic scenario (that you likely justify with your experience of IT systems and their bugs, but Apollo 11 had IT too, and got it done, and everyone back).

Allow the benefit of doubt that a "software-based" system would only be implemented, if it were superior in such a way, that such a situation doesn't even occur in the first place. That is the benefit. It alleviates the necessity for the "human-wiggling-around-laws-that-actually-make-it-illegal-what-you're-doing,-but-those-laws-are-stupid,-so-whatever,-we-don't-care-about-that-specific-law".

It's most likely a very unknown concept for anyone presently, since it doesn't yet exist, but I believe, if human civilization works more on the aspect of creating a universal law that is language-agnostic, we would have a better solution than the ones we currently have.

Also, tax filings and the like are basically automated. It's just about expanding such automated concepts for more efficiency as well as removing the language-bias laws exhibit. I'm fully aware of the shortcomings of automation, and also do believe that a human "arbitrator", or judge, is required and preferred.

But in essence, my goal in stating my opinion was to plant the idea of language-agnostic law, for which maths, code and logic can form a solution. It's philosophical pondering towards a global government policy in a very long-run.

> but Apollo 11 had IT too

So did the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Anything can go wrong, anywhere. Still, I think the IT guys and gals in space-tech have (necessarily) one of the best track records in reliability.

> And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

That is, indeed, that natural conclusion of the deeply flawed premise that law and regulation are basically computer code written by programmers who have to contend with buggy, sometimes malicious, computing units.

But other than the fact that the word “code” is often used in reference to each, law/regulation and computer code are not the same kind of thing.

> Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

The fuzziness in law and regulation is very rarely anything close to minimum required because you are dealing with natural language, and very often deliberate to create room for flexible application. And there is a strong overlap between the places that that is least true and widely perceived gross injustices in the law.

> Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

No, it's not.

> To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units.

Having spent a fair amount of time working in various bureaucracies, and studying law and government administration, that's very much not true. It's very much the idealized view that many people outside of bureaucracies have of them, especially people in computing, but it's very much not a good approximation of most real bureaucracies, or their governing law and regulation, because the latter usually is written in a way which deliberately relies heavily on discretion within (often deliberately fuzzy) constraints rather than seeking to provide deterministic rules for outcomes, and in many systems regulation is actually written by the bureaucrats enforcing it (who also tend to have disproportionate influence on shaping the actual law).

You'll see down in the subthread that I essentially agree with what you wrote here. However, I still maintain the analogy to a distributed computing system is good and revealing. It's particularly the observation of the flow of forms and documents in and out of bureaucracy, as well as within it, that makes me think of it.

As explained below, I don't agree that it's a good idea to replace bureaucracy with code. However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy. At the very least, it gives us language to talk about bureaucracies as systems.

> However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy.

This I definitely agree with; it's kind of disappointing the information systems engineering knowledge has tended to become siloed within organizations dedicated to information technology, because you get much bigger gains if you apply that knowledge to broader processes, not just within computing systems supporting the processes. OTOH, with people who have that knowledge generally getting paid more to apply it in IT (and getting listened to more there), it's kind of understandable if unfortunate that the knowledge gets stuck in IT.

So true. It's maybe not intended, but no fat shaming please.

I don't think that's really true. Authoritarian regimes are, if anything, more prone to personal foibles of individual decision-makers than others.

This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment

Zomg good thing this is visible.

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse.

I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure,

I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day.

The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam.

With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit.

Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `ilovewalkingdogs@fastmail.com`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails.

I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name.

And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.

I don't want to spoil any joy of yours but this is in my experience pretty standard with most email providers.

With some you can do the + trick (which gmail probably still does) but i just have my domain as catchall and it works pretty great with blacklisting.

And a fairly common trick used by those who want to mask how they got your email address is to strip everything between + and @ in the email address you gave them.

The reason Fastmail's feature matters is specifically because it's not using the + trick or a catch-all domain. They're 'real' aliases, not just Regex filters or wildcards.

If you're using the + trick, you haven't gained any privacy, because I can strip the + and get your original address.

If you're using a catch-all domain, you haven't gained any privacy, because the domain remains a unique identifier for your all of your accounts. It's good for organizing, but not for privacy, because you're still publicly attaching your identity to every email you send.

With fastmail, I don't need to do myaddress+walmart@fastmail.com or walmart@danshumway.com. I can just do walmart@fastmail.com. That's a really large privacy win, since it gets rid of one of the biggest and least regulated unique identifiers that services can share with each other.

I don't know if other providers like Outlook are also offering 'real' aliases. I'm happy if they are, I think this should be an industry standard feature. Either way, switching to any provider does will be a pretty significant feature upgrade over Gmail, even if you're currently using a paid Gmail account with your own domain.

I see so the only difference is that they provide 600 aliases on their domain compared to lets say 25 of other providers. I wonder how they deal with poluted namespace.

So It so different from random domain catchall?

The reason why i would be worried about Fastmail is that they have are Australian company with servers in US. Both of those mean that Law enforcement can simply ask for users emails.

Now i am for sure not target of Law enforcement or goverment so i dont care but i am not sure why i wouldnt use service thats in better juristiction and is privacy focused.

I believe outlook & yahoo mail also have real aliases.

I’ve been looking at Office 365 this weekend as an alternative to my (single person) GSuite account. I’m actually pretty impressed. It feels much more polished than than Google’s software (to me, anyway). Teams also looks like a good slack alternative, I’ve already got good use out of OneNote, and all the Mac desktop software launches very quickly (definitely not the MS Office I remember!).

I think I may actually migrate all my email over today. The idea of having a different interface to GMail is pretty exciting. I’ve been staring at that (increasingly slow) interface for too long.

20 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have imagined myself doing this, but it actually seems like decent software now. Sure I need to jump into bed with MS, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Google.

I agree, Google is not forcing anyone to use their browser, yet people are complaining that Google is evil and immediately after continue to use their products/services. I don't understand the human psychology behind this..

s/these days/always/

Here, fixed it for you.

This feels like 1994 all over again. In 1994 you had one dominant software monopoly in Microsoft. Today you have several: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook with dominance in individual spheres of influence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.

Also, as far as I know, even couldn't.

They had different knobs available to them, and it's not clear given the opportunity that they wouldn't try it. E.g. it was less common for PCs to be connected to the internet and receive OS updates, so they wouldn't have an effective way of using a policy like that.

They certainly did their best to prevent any other OS from being on your hardware.

They still are not doing it right? You just get the "downloaded from internet" warning.

I think you can argue that current day MS is a little more afraid of anti-trust action than 1990s MS. Game developers were legitimately scared that MS was going to do this for windows and start taking their own 30% cuts from all PC games. I'm not sure if Valve confirmed it, but it seems likely that SteamOS/Steam machines were at least partly a backup plan for ensuring there was a place to sell games without MS skimming off the top.

No, but there was that whole “Windows won’t run on DR-DOS” scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

They would have loved that though!

I mean Steam was made as a panicked reaction when Microsoft announced its Windows store. People in the industry knew very well what they were trying to do.

Steam predates any windows app store stuff by almost a decade, it wasn't a "panicked reaction" to anything.

Yeah, grandparent is misremembering a real event. Steam did do a panicked reaction to Windows store: a hard pivot to Linux support and the linux-based SteamOS.

Steam was nowhere near the app store we know today when it was created. It was Valve's auto-updater and match-making service. They had a few partner games using it as well.

I may recall it badly but I am pretty sure they opened it to general companies and indie studios as a reaction to Windows 8 built-in app store:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377

I've been on steam since a while after it's genesis. IIRC the store aspect of steam started in 2006-2007, which is way before even windows 8 which only came out after 2011-2012

They made PC makers pay a license fee per computer even if the computer didn’t ship with Windows.

They coined the term embrace, extend, extinguish. See the history of Internet Explorer.

It's time to switch to Firefox and advocate for Firefox usage.

That's very sad to hear, I've been an avid user of HabitLab. Thank you so much for developing this tool! I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Chromium fork with the HabitLab interventions integrated deeper into the browser? I think there's a lot of potential and interest for a productivity-oriented browser that helps stay focused and develop good time management skills.

A Chromium fork is going to be a pain to maintain. My contingency plan if it gets removed from the Chrome store is to try to get it accepted into the Edge and Opera stores, and ask users to switch to either Edge or Opera (and provide sideloading instructions for those who want to stick to Chrome).

Why not, might I ask, Firefox?

Edit: no need to reply, I've seen your answer below, thanks.

Good luck getting drm content to work on a chromium fork.

I'm really sorry to hear that--it looks like a useful extension and I'm sure you've put a lot of hard work into it.

Naive question to you and to other extension developers here ... how does Firefox do when it comes to this issue? Is it just that the market share is so much lower that it's not worth developing for FF? I ask this as a happy FF user on mac, linux, ios.

I tried porting the extension over to Firefox when Firefox switched to WebExtensions, and at the time there were tons of incompatibilities, mostly with Firefox's Shadow DOM implementation (HabitLab is a huge and complicated codebase, porting it is non-trivial - I had an issue tracking it at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/issues/137 ). I'm sure it's a valid option for smaller extensions however. At the moment I'm trying to get it accepted on the Edge store, as Edge is much more compatible with Chrome extensions than Firefox.

I wonder if others are thinking the same re: Edge and whether this will eventually lead to chrome losing users to Edge as useful extensions find a home there.

Have you tried again with Firefox recently? I'm the developer of an extension that makes extensive use of the Shadow DOM for UI components in content scripts. I recently ported our Chrome-only extension over to Firefox and had a few minor issues but none with the UI. I'm even using React for Shadow DOM UI components and it's been working well in both browsers.

I work for Microsoft on a moderately complex chromium extension. We've investigated porting it to Firefox (we've had a small but nonzero minority of users ask about it, and several of our engineers have a personal interest in it), but it's really hard to estimate ahead of time how much effort it's going to be. Most of the issues are not so bad to fix individually, it's just an unknown-length onion peeling exercise. It's especially challenging when a library/framework you use is impacted by a difference and its maintainers aren't motivated to improve compatibility; some examples of this we've run into include "Firefox's RegExp implementation doesn't support named capture groups" (but the library author doesn't want to make the code less readable by not using them) and "Firefox's auto-size behavior for extension popup UI (what you see when you click am extensions toolbar icon) sometimes sends spurious window resize events when the DOM is modified" (the UI control library we use has behavior to dismiss context menus on window resize, which this breaks).

The most painful incompatibility I've read about was in the Bitwarden extension, which basically doesn't support most operations in Firefox private windows because Firefox intentionally doesn't support getBackgroundPage() from there, and Bitwarden architected their extension to use that for all IPC between their frontend and backend layers. You can avoid that incompatibility by using runtime.sendMessage for that purpose, but they didn't know that at the time they wrote it (there's a warning about it in the MDN docs for getBackgroundPage now, but that warning wasn't there at the time). We happened to have gotten lucky in our extension in that we use sendMessage for the same purpose, but we certainly didn't know about that incompatibility at the time we were making the architectural decision.

Beyond just making it work, our team would also want to be able to automate regression tests against Firefox if we were to officially support it. For a long time, selenium was the most realistic option for that, but we switched away from selenium to puppeteer a year ago due to reliability issues with the former. Now that Firefox support in puppeteer is very recently starting to stabilize, we're hopeful we'd be able to use that, but we haven't tried it yet and it's new enough that we wouldn't expect it to be fully compatible/stable yet.

While the notice probably comes from some automated system resembling authoritarian governments as described below, it looks like your extension would be undesirable to Google's business model and metrics they would want to optimize anyway. I hope you can find a different platform to run the extension, it seems more friendly than the screen time features in Apple.

I haven't used Chrome since I've left Google and would recommend everyone to move to an alternative non-Chrome-based browser for a more balanced ecosystem. All the bad behaviour can be avoided when companies actually need to look after retaining users and taking care of not so frequent cases and I hope better business practices can come up without the need for government intervention.

I used to feel impressed when someone told me they worked at Google. Now i just wonder if they're apart of the teams that make these horrendous decisions and force terrible UX on us and deprecate features that users love.

Make your extension available on Firefox

> Some anonymized data will be sent to Stanford for research purposes. See our privacy policy for details.

Maybe this text on your front page is triggering someone at Google extensions department?

When you are detained by the police, you don't have to do the guesswork of what you did wrong.

The police should/would tell you.

Is there a workaround for users? Old builds of Chromium?

It works fine with the current versions of Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Edge), you'll just need to sideload it once it gets removed from the Chrome store. Alternatively, if/when I manage to get it accepted into the Edge store, you could switch to Edge.

I thought Google banned sideloading unapproved extensions on Windows and Mac.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/external_extensions

Well, you can enable developer mode, extract the extension, add it manually, re-enable developer mode every time Chrome starts, and manually update to each new version...

No need to re-enable it every time Chrome starts.

I meant distribution as a zip file that you can load in developer mode, like the installation instructions for Bypass Paywall ( https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome ). It's not a very user friendly installation process but it still works. But yes, CRX-based sideloading no longer works on Chrome.

I believe CRX-based sideloading is still a Chromium feature. For example, if I turn on developer mode in Vivaldi, I can drag a CRX onto the extensions page and install it without a problem.

Would be great if you ported HabitLab for Firefox

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