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by ecaron 4376 days ago
I wonder how the community over at addons.mozilla.org (AMO) feels when they see something like this. On one hand, there's a sense of "We'll never see any playful plugins like this because our approval process is slower than Apple's and less well defined."

On the other hand, their garden is well groomed while the Chrome Web Store has a lot of noise...

2 comments

But Mozilla didn't lock their browser down to only install addons from their own app site. So you can load addons from any developer's own web site (or any other site), which is what usually happens for toy stuff like this. e.g. https://github.com/DaveRandom/cloud-to-butt-mozilla
Chrome lets you install .crx extensions on your own too, although it's harder.

Not that I like the proprietary Chrome or the fauxpen Chromium...

They will also warn you a few browser restarts later that the extension may be malicious and disable it for you. I know this, because I used to make my own extensions, distribute them as .crx files, and people would use them. Now they keep getting disabled. The only way around it is to list them on the chrome store. You can have an unlisted entry on the chrome store which is free, but they will remain in control of your private keys and update process. And of course they will know that the extension exists and who uses it.

The only way around this, apparently, is to install the developer edition of Chrome, which means being plagued with bugs and possible security risks. Splendid.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969

Woah what the fuck. Thank God I don't have to use this crappy browser except for a few pages that break in FF.
Yes, I used to be an avid Chrome user but recently feel like it has becoming less and less pleasant.
How? I followed the instructions on this page https://plus.google.com/+PatrickAljord/posts/LiiabJQ6hvG and they don't work. And that's from late last year.
Not allowed anymore on Windows. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969
What's not open about Chromium, out of interest?
It's still pretty tied to Google; the routine reminders to "sign in with your Google account!" are one aspect of that.

That said, it's still pretty open as well, and being FOSS, it's certainly doable for there to be a fork (if there isn't one already) that strips out everything Google-related.

You're thinking of Google Chrome, Chromium[0] is the open-source project behind Google Chrome, they're different, and Chromium is tied less to Google.

[0]: http://www.chromium.org/

No, I'm thinking of Chromium. I use Chromium rather regularly. Last I checked, the various prompts for me to log in with my Google account when starting up a fresh install of Chromium aren't my hallucinations.
All these plugins that do word-replacing should evolve like Adblock: a single plugin controlled by external lists.
Yup. One of the other commenters suggested checking into Greasemonkey, but it's only for Firefox. Something could be created with a build step that creates the plugins for multiple browsers.