hoverzoom

> Optional permissions: > Access your data for all websites uhhhhhhh I would recommend everyone read "Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer" [0] before they install random browser add-ons like this 0: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

Depends on the personal situation. An extension with 2 million users can generate a very meaningful revenue. My extension has only 300k users, but offers that I received over years [0] would have been significant in some lower-income country. [0] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

The tempation is quite strong, especially for popular extensions Here's what it can look like to an author of a popular extension: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

For over 10 years that I maintain a reasonably popular cross-browser extension, I've been collecting various monetization offers. They simply don't stop coming: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

People keep saying that. There are two problems with that, namely ① Google's own ads are easy to block using the new API and ② the new API is effective at blocking various evil attacks. If Google wanted to get rid of ad blockers, I'm sure they could come up with an API that does a better job than that. https://textslashplain.com/2024/10/13/content-blocking-in-ma... shows a ten-line ad blocker that blocks Google's ads, https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670 is a list of polite email messages from people who'd like to have elevated access to browsers.

For an example of a scary list of such offers, see https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

I will leave this as a gallery of emails with offers to buy extension hoverzoom: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670 Sidenote: The "collaboration" offers come from time to time even to non-extensions projects, if they are reasonably widely used. E.g. simple tools (rather widely used suite of android apps recently sold).

> Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay. So the author can't think of any other reason for this change other than to "slow down ad blocker updates" Well how about stuff like this: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670 Where an extension dev details offers to "monetize" his extension and basically perform a bait and switch and make it malicious. Pretending that V3 is all about ad blockers is more than a little disingenuous.

Most such tools can no longer afford their stance once adoption passes a threshold. Why that might be is often revealed on techdirt: - https://www.techdirt.com/edition/freespeech/ For other reasons, see also: - https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/the-ugly-business-of-mone... - https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

These type of malicious offers for extensions are actually quite common. See this[0] and the discussion[1]. I try to stick with only the most popular of extensions in the hope that any malicious changes would be widespread news, but it is still a gamble. [0] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066680