>> "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?
Huh? Seems free for me to use. What specifically do you have to pay for?
Cheap compared to an iOS developer account, but still...
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.
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.
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
For openness, no, of course not.
Unless I misunderstand the blocking of non-web-store extensions, you can distribute extension for free, just not to Windows users.
Oh okay, so you'd just lose out on ~90% of the market?
[1]: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-users-fr...