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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

This is why I started using Chromium instead of Chrome -- Chrome forces you now to use (and pay for!) the web store (it's impossible to install extensions not hosted by Google, if you're running on Windows because "think of the users!"[1]) and if your extension doesn't get along with any of their policies (i.e. the extensions listed here), then Chrome users can't use it at all. Super-awesome, Google.

Chromium doesn't (at the moment) have these restrictions.

[1]: The post with this fucking Newspeak title: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-users-fr...

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I'm just using Firefox instead. Because the browser is just as good, and seems to genuinely push for http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

>> "Chrome forces you now to use (and pay for!) the web store"

Huh? Seems free for me to use. What specifically do you have to pay for?

It costs $5 to get a developer account for the Chrome Web Store.

Cheap compared to an iOS developer account, but still...

That sounds more like it's "show us you're a real person before we host your stuff" than any real attempt to make money...

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files…”

Yeh, that seems pretty reasonable especially when you consider the price of other dev programs (just had to renew my iOS membership today).

No, let's not go down the path of saying things are OK because they're better than the worst option out there.

How about going down the path of placing an insignificant, minimal, token fee of admission on the service to weed out zero-effort scammers?

I was more talking about the logic of it. "Apple charges $100 therefore $5 is a good deal" isn't good logic.

For security, verified chrome store is better than someone's self-host. And many users might just download random add-ons and think they are legit when they are not. I am not saying all chrome store apps are safe, but when shit goes wrong it is Google's responsibility to take it down from spreading and mitigate the issue.

For openness, no, of course not.

It is reasonable because it prevents spam. Simple as that.

Ok, it seems pretty reasonable, when you consider how easy it is to obtain five dollars.

I can see it MAYBE being an issue in countries where income isn't as high as the U.S., but at least for any American, or anyone in any industrialized country, the $5 fee to get an account is not a significant impediment.

"at least for any American, or anyone in any industrialized country"

Yeah, nobody can't possibly be that poor, eww! And who needs talented people in the third world making great extensions and possibly finding better jobs or at least global recognition that way.

Err, I think you should think through your argument logically a bit more...

You're using a "Think of the poor!" argument, just like they use "Think of the children!".

It's a complete strawman.

Put it this way - if they can program a Chrome extension - that means they probably have access to a reasonably modern computer. And working internet access. And they they're probably fairly educated. And they had all these things for some time, since this isn't the sort of thing you can learn and hack up in 5 minutes, unless your name happens to be Jeff Dean.

So yes, I'd say that the above group probably does have access to $5.

We're not talking about illiterate villagers in Africa or rural China here with no running water and one OLPC for the village.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do something to help those people (Red Cross does awesome work here, btw, good people to donate to) - however, I somehow doubt that programming Chrome Extensions is at the top of those people's list of priorities.

Yeah, I was getting a bit ahead of myself there. Fair enough. Also, Firefox.

But still:

> So yes, I'd say that the above group probably does have access to $5.

This doesn't mean it's not still a week's of income for where they're from, and money missed dearly. Even if it's not the "the top priority", which I never claimed, I find shrugging it off because it's (supposedly) not a problem for anyone in the first world a bit meh. Would it still deter driveby spammers if it cost 3$? 2$? Are there other ways to ensure this? To not even go further because "meh, just five bucks", kinda sucks. On the other hand, it's also stupid to tell Google how much to charge, let them suck :P

I think he means for developers. There's no way to distribute extensions for free now, where before they could be self-hosted.

> There's no way to distribute extensions for free now, where before they could be self-hosted.

Unless I misunderstand the blocking of non-web-store extensions, you can distribute extension for free, just not to Windows users.

> Just not to Windows users.

Oh okay, so you'd just lose out on ~90% of the market?

They can still be self-hosted, but you're not able to install just by clicking on them. You have to download the crx file and then drag it into the extensions window.

Currently, yes. But in the article linked [1] above they claim that that too will be prohibited starting january

[1]: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-users-fr...

If it's important that your extension not be hosted on the Web Store, Windows users can still install it as an unpacked extension and perform updates manually. But it's definitely designed to be much more of a pain.

As part of our continuing security efforts, we’re announcing a stronger measure to protect Windows users: starting in January on the Windows stable and beta channels, we’ll require all extensions to be hosted in the Chrome Web Store. We’ll continue to support local extension installs during development as well as installs via Enterprise policy, and Chrome Apps will also continue to be supported normally. [1]

My understanding is that you won't be able to sideload extensions locally anymore, unless you're using the dev channel.

Yes, this sucks big time.

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-users-fr...

EDIT:Apparently this doesn't work on windows at all. Wow

The process is much more difficult(you have to actually drag it onto the extension page or open the downloaded file) and unlike in safari it won't automatically update so you need to design your own update system. You also lose the permissions systems when you do that.

> The process is much more difficult(you have to actually drag it onto the extension page or open the downloaded file)

I'm pretty sure that was the manual process before they actually disabled non-webstore extensions. Before they disabled them earlier this year, Chrome would download them in the background but refuse to install them with a message indicating that you could not install non-Web Store extensions unless you did that, but would allow you to install them by that means; what you have to do now is use the preferred method for development, which is unpacking the extension and adding it after turning on the developer mode -- which allows using unpacked extensions -- option in Chrome settings.)

You seem to care about this a lot more, and I'm honestly ignorant about these issues. But I'd just add that nearly every casual computer user is running some unwanted extension, toolbar, DNS hijacker, or worse. For whatever reason, it seems like this shit software ends up on a lot of computers through extensions

Wouldn't Google's decision this help to eliminate that problem?

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