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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> I have an extension idea; it's literally a single line of JS. However, to get it into Safari, I need to create a (useless, and empty) Mac app with a specific configuration in Xcode that'll allow it to appear in the "extensions" list in Safari. Then I need to deal with all the signing & App Store distribution stuff if I actually want to distribute it.

Probably less annoying, but there's still a time and effort cost to publishing on both Chrome and Firefox as well. They don't have the same policies, the APIs have differences, they have their own bugs, and the submission/review process is different for each. It's a real drag, compared to pushing updates to a website.

Also, with the Chrome store right now, once you push an update for review, there's no way to replace it with a newer update until the (up to 3 weeks) review process finishes so say goodbye to pushing quick fixes, automated deploys and fast iterations. It's ridiculous.

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Publishing extensions on Chrome/Firefox is annoying, and we probably would have more extensions if it was easier.

But, it's not so annoying that the entire platform is being abandoned. This is a matter of degree, but there's a point where the effects of that annoyance become very obvious.

If publishing on Apple devices was just a tiny bit more annoying, devs would complain and then still publish their extensions. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening, it seems Apple has crossed a line where extension devs have decided to just ignore the entire thing.

Come on you can’t compare what it takes to submit an update on those two. Literally 5 clicks and drop a zip on the page, so long as they don’t single you out for manual review.

Apple requires a thousand clicks, a 11GB app on your computer and the manual review every time.

I push my extension to Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. Updates for me take less than five minutes to upload and appear within an hour or so.

Maybe it's because I don't have many users, or don't use any minification, or something else?

I'd like to publish for Safari but it's a much higher bar. Similar to the old Edge extensions which required Microsoft Store hoop jumping.

> I push my extension to Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.

Do you automated this or are there manual steps?

> Updates for me take less than five minutes to upload and appear within an hour or so.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/faq/#faq-listing-...

"Review times vary; some reviews complete in a few hours, others take many days, and in some cases a review can take several weeks. ... If your item's status says "pending review" for more than three weeks, you should contact support."

Reviews are meant to take longer if you ask for e.g. permission to all URLs (which a large number of popular extensions need to because of lack of permission granularity). Maybe your extension isn't impacted here? There's no guarantee the next update won't get trapped in the review queue either, which is not going to be fun when a critical fix is pending.

> Do you automated this or are there manual steps?

Manual for the time being.

> Maybe your extension isn't impacted here? There's no guarantee the next update won't get trapped in the review queue either,...

Mine does need all URLs, though it is possible the next review could take days or weeks. Yet it's all still so much simpler a process than Safari.

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