[Analemma_]

That is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users now expect the software to be free and throw a fit if they're charged for it (especially if it's an ongoing cost, because god forbid developers can't live off a single payment for the rest of their lives)

It's only gradually becoming common knowledge, but eventually we're going to collectively realize that Google killed small ISVs, and at the time we all cheered them on.

[lukifer]

Reminds me of the Google Reader saga: it took over from dedicated RSS readers due to convenience and experience, but when it was killed, the RSS ecosystem never fully bounced back.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

There was never a healthy economy of paid browser extensions, neither before nor after Google's entry into the space.

[nashashmi]

Maybe not paid browser extensions, but firefox had an amazing library of extensions and Chrome stole their thunder. Of course then Ff shot themselves in the foot by deprecating XUL and requiring developers rewrite their scripts, but with everyone on Chrome, very few people did.

[duskwuff]

What "healthy economy of paid software" previously existed here? The only other site for browser extensions I'm aware of which predated the Chrome Web Store was addons.mozilla.org, and that never supported paid extensions at all.

[ufmace]

I think for a while, Google sort of hoped to turn Chrome extensions into something like actual apps. They seemed to support stuff like making desktop icons for them, opening them in windows that seemed to be independent from Chrome, making them the only way to make something that seemed like a real app on Chromebooks, etc. With all of that in place, it seems to make sense to let people pay charge/pay for them. Then I guess they just kind of got tired of it, as Google tends to do, and started dropping various parts of that system.

Probably the only reason they bothered to post a notice and write a really lame migration plan is that a decent number of developers were making money from it and would pitch a fit if it just disappeared.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

Google apps (for Chrome?) were somewhat separate but under one store, they just got Android apps working on chromebooks, deprecated it and now this. It's just a push towards Android ecosystem where they make more money.

[nitrogen]

Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creation and destruction (similar to the EEE cycle MS has employed), has killed whatever of that vision might have flourished.

[duskwuff]

> Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

I don't buy that argument. While I can't speak for all users, most of the extensions I use are ones which modify the behavior of the web browser or of specific web pages. They wouldn't have any meaning outside the context of a web browser.

Maybe paid extensions represented part of a different ecosystem? If so, though, it's one I never really encountered a need for.

[bawolff]

The last browser extension i used that was basically an app was chatzilla for firefox, and that was a long time ago. I can't even think of an extension that would make sense as an independent app, let alone one i would pay for.

[therealx]

People pay for 2fa and password management. Granted the model of payment for those is usually shifted, but there could have been a sold product on the store. I would pay for the Adblockers I use, but just donate instead (when possible.) I could see a lot of b2b companies selling their extensions.

Edit: I have maybe 20 extensions installed in general. Everything to killing websites ability to affect my ability to copy/paste to transcoders.

[lawrenceyan]

It's the "desert of profitability" strategy [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048329