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by duskwuff 2092 days ago
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.
2 comments
ufmace 2092 days ago
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.

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9HZZRfNlpR 2092 days ago
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.
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nitrogen 2092 days ago
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.

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duskwuff 2092 days ago
> 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.

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bawolff 2092 days ago
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.
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therealx 2092 days ago
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.

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