Ever since Safari killed off the old-style extensions they had, and forced the annoying 'you must bundle in an app' on everything so that it has to be on their app store, it's basically been dead to me.
If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser (so Firefox it's been for me ever since).
The most developer-hostile (and hence user-hostile) move they did was to also force devs to be registered to be able to distribute extensions for Safari, something that's free to do with all other browsers (or ba
This. I wrote an extension in an hour or two back when Safari 5.1 was brand new and I was bored of reading through research papers in grad school. It scratched an itch I had by restoring behavior that had changed to how it worked previously. Nothing fancy, and certainly not something I ever profited from nor sought to profit from. I enjoyed the experience and enjoyed having the itch scratched. While I'd have been fine if technical considerations forced it into obsolescence (and I thus got some more experience in developing a new version of it), it was the mandatory migration to the Apple Developer program that eventually killed it.
I was originally able to develop the extension for free, sign it for free, publish it in the extension gallery for free, distribute it on my website for free, push out updates for free, etc.. Today, I'd need to pay $100/year to join the Apple Developer program, would need to publish an app to the Mac App Store to act as a container for the extension, would need to wait for it to go through Apple's review process, would need to do the same with any subsequent updates, and would need to pay another $100 for each additional year that I want to push out updates for my freely available app that never earned me a cent.
Everyone loses when companies make it harder for the little guys to make things for them. A few thousand people benefitted from a bored grad student building an extension in his spare time, Apple benefitted from thousands of likeminded developers building extensions to scratch their own itches, and the accumulation of all those extensions resulted in an ecosystem that covered needs for far more people. It was admittedly never as good as Chrome's or Firefox's extensions galleries, but it was decent enough.
They don't exist (Score:3)
Ever since Safari killed off the old-style extensions they had, and forced the annoying 'you must bundle in an app' on everything so that it has to be on their app store, it's basically been dead to me.
If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser (so Firefox it's been for me ever since).
The most developer-hostile (and hence user-hostile) move they did was to also force devs to be registered to be able to distribute extensions for Safari, something that's free to do with all other browsers (or ba
Re:They don't exist (Score:2)
This. I wrote an extension in an hour or two back when Safari 5.1 was brand new and I was bored of reading through research papers in grad school. It scratched an itch I had by restoring behavior that had changed to how it worked previously. Nothing fancy, and certainly not something I ever profited from nor sought to profit from. I enjoyed the experience and enjoyed having the itch scratched. While I'd have been fine if technical considerations forced it into obsolescence (and I thus got some more experience in developing a new version of it), it was the mandatory migration to the Apple Developer program that eventually killed it.
I was originally able to develop the extension for free, sign it for free, publish it in the extension gallery for free, distribute it on my website for free, push out updates for free, etc.. Today, I'd need to pay $100/year to join the Apple Developer program, would need to publish an app to the Mac App Store to act as a container for the extension, would need to wait for it to go through Apple's review process, would need to do the same with any subsequent updates, and would need to pay another $100 for each additional year that I want to push out updates for my freely available app that never earned me a cent.
Everyone loses when companies make it harder for the little guys to make things for them. A few thousand people benefitted from a bored grad student building an extension in his spare time, Apple benefitted from thousands of likeminded developers building extensions to scratch their own itches, and the accumulation of all those extensions resulted in an ecosystem that covered needs for far more people. It was admittedly never as good as Chrome's or Firefox's extensions galleries, but it was decent enough.
Today, that's no longer the case.