[stickfigure]

The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?!

Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing, maybe too much fraud?

I understand shutting down expensive products. It's weird keeping the expensive product running and shutting off the revenue model, no?

[zmmmmm]

I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).

[jake_morrison]

My guess is that Google promotes people based on creating a new service, but not taking over an old service and running it / improving it. So when a manager leaves the organization, their service is orphaned: there is nobody to run it, and nobody to fight for it, so they shut it down. Customers and revenue are more or less irrelevant to this calculation.

[londons_explore]

It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened.

It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.

[londons_explore]

Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.

[lallysingh]

.. "will this get me promoted or should I work on something new?"

[adonese]

Inbox should have met that metric. I think it is a culture thing, it's far more easier to deprecate any product than to keep supporting it

[dx87]

I'm still mad about Inbox. I moved over to it from Gmail because they said that it was going to be the future of Gmail when it launched. Instead, they abandoned it.

[skinnymuch]

How much of Inbox’s features were moved over to Gmail? Will more be moved over? I never used Inbox.

[roryokane]

Many of Inbox's features were moved over, such as Snoozing emails, but far from all of the features. I doubt they will move over more — if they had wanted to they would have done it when they shut down Inbox.

The biggest feature I miss from Inbox is the integration of TODOs and emails: you could create editable TODOs in your inbox as easily as composing a new email, and when viewing am email thread, you could create a TODO attached to an email thread (e.g. “review the attached document and reply with my feedback”).

[wrinkl3]

> That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?!

I bought into the browser extensions heavily when they first became a thing - I was in high-school and would take pride in beefing up my browser with as many utilities as humanly possible. Once the novelty wore off it became apparent that I was using only a couple of them passively, and had absolutely zero need for the rest. Extensions seem neat in theory, but they're mainly useful from removing annoying/harmful behaviour from websites, and monetizing those cases is tricky. People would probably pay for Adblockers, but there's no need.

[Thaxll]

I use Chrome since day 1 and today I learned you can buy extensions, that should give you some perspective.

[usepgp]

I _work_ on chrome and today I learned you can buy extensions.

[toyg]

Average users just don’t “do” extensions. People typically don’t mod their software. I’ve learnt this over the years. Any sort of extension, “power toy” or customization is always going to be a niche, in the great scheme of things.

> Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing

If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.

[can16358p]

Even many power users don't do extensions. I'm a developer, who is heavily into frontend stuff, and even though I tried many times, I could never get used to using any extension in my life.

I set up a DNS based blocker and that's more than enough. I don't try to hunt 100% of the ads, there's nothing wrong if some of them are displayed as long as the pages aren't fully bloated with them anyway.

[jfoster]

Anecdotally, I could probably get lots of value from some extensions (even free ones) but I generally won't consider installing them because a lot of the ones I could get value from would be able to intercept all data rather than specific sites or during times when I choose to activate them.

I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome.

I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.

[seanwilson]

> I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.

For what it's worth you can create a new user profile in Chrome (click your profile picture in the top left then click "add"), and it'll open a new window which is completely isolated from all your regular browsing. It's a decent approach if you want to install a ton of dev extensions.

Also, I run a paid Chrome extension and have good conversion rates from the website -> downloading the free version, so I don't think a lot of users are that bothered by this anyway. People recommend Lastpass, uBlock and Grammarly all the time, which ask for wide permissions.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.

[nitrogen]

Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed.

In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?

[rswail]

As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc.

The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps.

So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.

[skinnymuch]

A small fraction of people including tech people know you can charge for browser extensions as a one off. I’m still not sure if you can actually. I’ve never seen an integrated payment for an extension. At best something like a SaaS with focus on browser extension.

The amount of profit from this has to be so tiny for Google or any mid cap tech company since no one really knows about it.

I made a comment with some upvoteS here a week or two ago about my hopes that the new Safari could maybe usher in an era of browser extensions being seen more as apps than current status quo but without the ridiculous high priced recurring prices being added more and more.

IE paying $1+ one time, or $1-3/mo, or $10-25/year being a not uncommon situation would be great in my opinion. Both stamp out the rampant data mining extensions do, legitimize extensions more, and hopefully get some indie developers paid.

[r14n]

The marketplace did not fail. The Chrome Web Store lives on - it's just the PAYMENT section of it that fails. All the extensions will still exist and be available for download, we devs just can't use Google's payment or subscription service anymore.

So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info.

And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(

[bawolff]

Nobody has ever managed to sell a web browser (Netscape's problem), im not sure why people would buy extensions when they wouldn't be willing to buy a browser.

[_qulr]

iCab

The problem today is that nobody can even make a browser. Even Microsoft failed, and was forced to adopt Chromium. The web has become far too complex.

[bawolff]

"Forced" is a bit strong. They did the math and realized that being competitive in the browser market was not worth the $$$$ they would have to spend to get there. Given that web browsers aren't really going to make MS money, unless they manage to get full dominance (which isnt really their strategy anymore and would be difficult in modern context), it was probably a smart business decision. If the business calculus was different i am sure they could.

[jfrunyon]

That's how a business gets forced to do something: money.

[josefx]

Google did actively slow and cripple its flagship sites on competing browsers without suffering any consequences. No amount of money will help against that kind of advantage.

[can16358p]

I can confirm. We have a normal Google doc (nothing super fancy) that spans about 10 pages at most, and when I scroll past about 8th page in Safari, scrolling becomes almost unusually sluggish and everything starts lagging.

[pishpash]

Maybe because mobile Chrome refuses to support extensions for fear of adblock killing the golden goose?

[_qulr]

> Is it just that nobody paid for things?

Correct. Most people expect Chrome extensions for free.