Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thundermuffin 1215 days ago
I was curious what the answer to this was, so I went to their Chrome extension page[0] and the icon + UI is prominently displayed in the 5th image. They also mention email (albeit you may be able to argue it's too vague) in the very first image. They also mention the feature in the extension's description with a brief "what is it?" blurb. You do have to expand the overview section to see it, but I think that's on Google's UI and not on any individual extension/developer being shady (it's been so long since I've installed a new extension, but a quick glance around the store makes it seem like everybody with a "long" description has stuff hidden like they do).

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy...
1 comments
matkoniecz 1215 days ago
The problem is that vast majority of users installed it before the ad was added.
link
thundermuffin 1215 days ago
I was just answering your question on if they advertised it, because I was also curious of the answer, haha.

edit: How do you like extensions to notify of new features? I've seen some do a new tab popup post-install, some just add them and you discover them like DDG, and I'm sure a few have added new features I'll never know about because they're disabled by default. I've always found the new tab way annoying, and I've been slightly less annoyed by just adding the feature with a way to disable.

link
matkoniecz 1214 days ago
> How do you like extensions to notify of new features?

No notifications at all.

Yes, I understand that it is a conflict of interest between me and whoever writes software.

Optionally, notification in some central standard system of notifications that people hating notifications can silence (not sure is such system existing - if it exists I silenced it long time ago). This would work fine as notifications-haters can disable them and vast majority of people will continue to get them.

link
thundermuffin 1213 days ago
Ahhh, gotcha!

So if I'm understanding correctly, you'd be fine with DDG's update if it was just the icon being added to the field (making an assumption here that the icon is how you activate the feature like a password manager), but by adding the ad/onboarding/whatever popup they went too far.

That's a fair criticism! At first, I was taking your stance as it was a terrible wrong that they added another privacy feature in general.

link