The most popular web extensions are those that deprive sites of direct and indirect revenue, which necessarily means they can’t charge for the service or their userbase would revolt and steal their rule sets (which is easy to do for a web extension). Having to pay money for such things goes against the grain of those users, and the sort of breakage that people think is acceptable for content blockers isn’t quite as acceptable in the wider Safari userbase as it is for the pi-hole folks. Imagine pi-hole charging a monthly subscription or else it allows ads through, and you can see immediately why this category is dead on arrival in revenue terms.
And, for the content blocker extensions market, there’s essentially no point in releasing it as a paid web extension for iOS/macOS users, because there’s already better paid app competitors that do this, like 1Blocker or Guardian VPN or etc, that are full native apps on the platform with the appropriate hooks to be performant and such.
Therefore: What valuable browser extension ideas other than content blockers exist, that could have any significant user base and value, that isn’t already met by better and more capable native apps on macOS and iOS, and somehow could charge people money for the extension with their willing cooperation? They’d obviously have to use a subscription model, so factor that into consideration when assessing the market.
I’m unable to come up with anything that would make this segment of the App Store market worth my time to invest code into, and I already have a developer account for other reasons, so I don’t even have the annual fee barrier to consider. I remain hopeful that I’m wrong, but no one’s made a convincing argument yet. Prove me wrong, HN.
(I see most people taking the “wrap WebKit” route instead, which makes more sense since it provides the capabilities an extension can’t offer, and is dead simple by virtue of the platform’s capabilities. Makes more sense to me, anyways, and then too. So: now what?)
If that ‘revenue is not relevant’ logic holds true, then it follows that the $99/year annual fee is not relevant to why developers are not releasing extensions. Which negates the most popular (and unsupported) argument against Apple’s model. But if it’s not that fee, then what is it that keeps people from releasing extensions for Safari?
I develop PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com), a browser extension that can predict the salary range of job opportunities. It's free but one person told me that he didn't mind to pay me if I added support for job opportunities in his country (UK). The extension has 700+ users now. I don't know whether this number can be considered as significant user base or not.
Later, I'll add the capability to predict the salary range of people from their Linkedin profiles. I would make this a premium feature. Let's see how it goes.
Cool. But, Closet Tools and Spider don’t support Safari, and they make so much money that it’s not because of the $99/year fee. Why else wouldn’t they, if not that?
So your argument is that there's no market for paid browser extensions on Safari and thus no incentive to make extensions? But how do you explain that Firefox & Chrome have thousands of free extensions?
> What browser extensions other than content blockers exist, that have any significant user base and value, that isn’t already met by better and more capable native apps on macOS and iOS, and somehow could charge people money for the extension with their willing cooperation?
Language-learning extensions are reasonably popular, though most aren’t making the big bucks.
Language learning on Netflix is great :) also Yomichan for Japanese. I’d assume there’s a lot more money though for people trying to learn English due to the market being much bigger.
> Imagine pi-hole charging a monthly subscription or else it allows ads through
I absolutely wouldn't mind paying additional 100% on top of my Internet subscription monthly if this could officially get me 100% ad-free, tracking-free, DRM-free and paywall-free web.
If only there were easy and efficient means for an Internet provider to distribute part of their revenue to content providers so they wouldn't have to deploy ads and tracking - that could be a beautiful world.
Sounds like you’re describing the BBC model, where the government funds them to produce high-quality broad-spectrum content without them having to deploy ads and tracking. I approve.
And, for the content blocker extensions market, there’s essentially no point in releasing it as a paid web extension for iOS/macOS users, because there’s already better paid app competitors that do this, like 1Blocker or Guardian VPN or etc, that are full native apps on the platform with the appropriate hooks to be performant and such.
Therefore: What valuable browser extension ideas other than content blockers exist, that could have any significant user base and value, that isn’t already met by better and more capable native apps on macOS and iOS, and somehow could charge people money for the extension with their willing cooperation? They’d obviously have to use a subscription model, so factor that into consideration when assessing the market.
I’m unable to come up with anything that would make this segment of the App Store market worth my time to invest code into, and I already have a developer account for other reasons, so I don’t even have the annual fee barrier to consider. I remain hopeful that I’m wrong, but no one’s made a convincing argument yet. Prove me wrong, HN.
(I see most people taking the “wrap WebKit” route instead, which makes more sense since it provides the capabilities an extension can’t offer, and is dead simple by virtue of the platform’s capabilities. Makes more sense to me, anyways, and then too. So: now what?)