Google Chrome Extensions Are Now Available 291
kai_hiwatari writes "The Google Chrome Extensions site is now open for Windows and Linux users — but not yet for Mac — and contains around 300 extensions. AdBlock is not yet available, however. (The closest thing to it is Adsweep, but right now it seems to be broken. Who wants to take this on?) Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?"
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?
No. For a lot of us, that's like asking, "Does the ability to run JavaScript put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?" or even, "Does the ability to render HTML put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?"
Extensions are among the core featureset that a browser should support. With extensions, you simply make sure that everything is possible to accomplish with the extension API instead of implementing new features. That way, the user decides how bloated the browser becomes and doesn't have to put up with the bloat of unwanted features.
No AdBlock? No Chrome for me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:3, Insightful)
He was clearly talking about the architecture, not the UI.
Personally, I'm skeptical that Chrome will offer significant performance improvements over Firefox once its extension system is up to scratch. Even if Chrome's architecture is better, I would expect the extensions themselves to be of similar quality to those in Firefox.
Re:No AdBlock? No Chrome for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a fundamental disagreement with the concept of telling your computer a domain points to a non-existent server simply in order to block advertisements originating from it.
The only entry in my hosts file is a server that was taking ages to respond, and as all it was providing was some stylesheets and javascript, I just mirrored the files on localhost and temporarily linked that server to 127.0.0.1. The hosts entry will be removed as soon as it’s no longer needed.
Only as bloated as you let it (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article:
The availability of extensions has nothing to do with potential bloat. It's how many extensions you add. Adding extensions for adding's sake will certainly cause bloat, but smart, targeted extension selection can keep things very lean. My Firefox install is efficient (for me) and lean.
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:3, Insightful)
Then packet dump. A reverse DNS on each packet would be enough information to whittle down the data.
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I trust more Google than some random guys on the Internet.
Extensions security? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, extensions are great - but for one detail: Security! The current extensions model is as insecure as hell. All extensions have full access to the browser process - there is NOTHING that stops a rogue extension that was helpfully installed when you tried to punch the monkey and clicked "Yes" to the annoying question from watching everything you do in the browser and send any input you type into a form back to a mother ship you didn't even know existed.
I appreciate that the idea of adding a decent security model into extensions and plugins is a hard, thorny problem to solve. But that is exactly why we really, desperately need it! The browser is, for many computing environments, the "Operating System". Although I write this on a Linux laptop, the computing platform I use for development isn't Windows or Linux or MacOS, it's Firefox/Chrome! I don't personally much care what O/S the end user uses.
Because of this importance, because the browser is fast becoming the only O/S that actually matters, it's vitally important that we develop SOME kind of framework for application level security. The utter lack of a current extensions security model is just begging for disaster!
No, and if you say it does, you get an F- at logic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:4, Insightful)
Take on AdBlock? (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock. If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall. That may happen whether or not you create the ad block extension because ads don't generate enough money to pay for the kind of reporting that newspapers used to do, but it will definitely happen if a tool for blocking ads gets adopted by any non-trivial subset of society.
I understand that advertisements can be annoying and often temperamental, but tools like this are rarely as precise as they should be. They usually end up blocking far more unless the user spends more time monkeying with the config files than it would take to actually glance at the ads or wait for them to finish their flash animation.
Also I want to remind people that some open source projects like Firefox depend on advertisements for their support. Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
An ad blocker for Google chrome will not only hurt Google but slice into Google's revenues and undercut their ability to pay for more development. Okay, you say, let's be selfish and ensure that the ad blocker won't block Google ads. That's clever, but it still hurts Google because it hurts the free information ecosystem which is what drives Google. If there's no free information, there's fewer and fewer things for Google to index and thus fewer and fewer reasons to look at Google ads.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool. The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't force people not to develop and deploy solutions to filter out ads any more than you can force them to look at them.
You have to accept this, and if your business model can't work because of it then it simply means that it's not viable.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in summary, if we block the ads, we'll have the internet of 1992, which I rather enjoyed?
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm grateful for this kind of attitude. Believe me. The competent websites watch for this kind of loss and they work hard to ensure that the ads don't damage their long term viability.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:5, Insightful)
To each his own. I like glancing at my home town newspaper without committing to a big subscription. If the ads don't work, though I won't have that option.
If you really want to live in the past, here's the Wayback Machine's take on Slashdot:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slashdot.org [archive.org]
Note, it didn't exist before ads and it won't exist without them.
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:1, Insightful)
Iron is Chrome, but without the open development process.
I'll consider trusting them when they deploy a public source code repository.
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:1, Insightful)
No, Chromium is Chrome but with all the things that violate your privacy removed (actually, not even added in the first place).
SRWare Iron is a lame attempt to rebrand Chromium.
Available? Well, kind of. (Score:5, Insightful)
From my browser:
From Google Chrome Extension site:
I realize that this was posted by kdawson, but having "beta test" in the title or, at the very least, somewhere in the summary would have been great.
Bloat? (Score:3, Insightful)
I make very little use of extensions, so I've always assumed that the bloaty behaviour I'd seen from Firefox was largely due to something other than extensions. Mostly, I think the thing which slows my system to a crawl is Flash having a tantrum on a frequent basis, which doesn't change much across browsers. Chrome is good because it makes it easier to kill off Flash. But earlier today the browser to eat my memory sufficiently rapidly that it took about an hour to get access again and kill it properly. I'm blaming Flash for that. *sigh*
Re:Extensions security? (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox extensions would be next to useless if there was sandboxing or anything like that. The entire base browser is more-or-less a large extension, at least from an architectural point of view. The idea is that extensions can and and replace arbitrary bits of the browser, because they're peers.
"Fixing" that problem would destroy Firefox.
Enough people use Firefox that, if your dire predictions were accurate, we'd see hundreds of exploits. But Firefox makes it really hard to install extensions from anywhere outside the SSL-secured addons.mozilla.org site.
IOW, it's not a problem
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Have you considered why people block ads in the first place? Historically ads have been both obtrusive and have degraded the user experience in terms of performance. Advertisers do not have a good record of restraining themselves, if they can get a neon ad to appear in the middle of your screen and shake around until you respond to it, that's what they're going to do. Now that the public has the ability to restrain ads it's up to the advertisers to figure out how to structure their ads so that they are not a problem for users. It would be pretty easy to gauge how well they're doing by the number of people who choose to block ads. It's not up to the public to support an obnoxious business model, if advertisers want money they need to figure out how to not be obnoxious. Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool.
If the long-term consequences involve removing ads from the internet, that's not a bad thing. Even if a lot of content goes with it, in time the content will come back and there will always be people willing to post content without expecting a paycheck from it. The internet doesn't exist to put money in your account.
The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
No it's not, it's far more robust then you give it credit for. Information will always be available online, as long as there are people willing to spread their message without being paid for it. That's the backbone of the internet, advertisers and people selling content are just along for the ride. If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were true, most "competent websites" would not accept Flash ads which are very distracting and demanding of CPU; nor would they put large amounts of ads on pages with minimal content.
The reality is that they try and push as much advertising as they can get away with, which turns out to be quite a lot because people will tolerate a lot of crap to read free content. But let's not pretend they are happy about it.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's bit silly to compare theft and especially murder to adblocking. It does nothing to support your case.
You are arguing that people are stealing your content if they don't view or click on your ads. However, you are exploiting them by selling their views to advertisers. They are a resource to you. Trees to be harvested, sheep to be fleeced. When some refuse to fall prey to this scheme you are upset because you lose income. Well, block them or charge them a fee. I'm pretty sure that most people will stop viewing your content but you won't be exploiting the dullards and the clever ones will get the content without the ads.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that AdBlock's only mode is "always on, except on whitelisted sites." If it had a mode of "always off, except for blacklisted sites" then I think a lot more people would get behind it-- content creators and web surfers.
I know for me, there are only about 3 domains I regularly see that have ads I want to block, everything else I visit I want to see the ads. But there's no way to tell AdBlock this, and so my choices are either to block all ads, or keep AdBlock constantly turned-off until I'm on one of those sites. Neither is a good choice.
Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? So it can be labeled for the troll that it is? It's not about ordinary users combing through source code. All it takes is for one person to do it and make their findings known. If you're running a corporation or have the interest and money, you can just hire someone to go through it for you. Try doing that to closed source software.
Who modded the parent's tripe insightful anyway?
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see. Just because there are 50-500 people who are willing to comment without reading TFA, we don't have to worry about the destruction of the business model that produces TFA.
I can only speak for myself, but I am in no way worried about the destruction of that particular business model. That is not something that keeps me awake at night.
There's no reason why both can't exist
That's true, and that's not to say that the only way professional content can exist is by pushing ads that users don't want to see.
I don't see why some anarchists should be able to dictate the terms for all of us
It sounds like you're trying to dictate a non-ad-blocking future. Most anarchists seem to be in favor of personal choice. If the majority of users online chose to block ads they wouldn't be anarchists, they would be the norm.
That being said, believe it or not but I don't block ads myself. Ads are rarely intrusive enough to make me want to block them and, if they are, I just leave the site. The only time I actually want to pro-actively block ads are when I'm looking at a blank page and see the status bar saying "Waiting for ads.xxx.xxx.com". Ironically enough, in that case the presence of the ads is actually stopping me from viewing the content, not allowing me to. If the ads weren't on the page it would have already loaded.
The major thing that is really pushing me towards blocking ads are the stories that people spread out over several pages. I know that the only reason they do that is to maximize their ad revenue because they can get more ad impressions per story. So I feel like they're making my experience less friendly, less usable, and more time-consuming in order to increase their revenue, and in that case I'm more than willing to push back and not allow those ads to get delivered to me in the first place. Again, this goes back to advertisers needing to find a non-obnoxious way to spread their message. If they delivered an entire several-thousand word story on a single page and had ads going down the sidebar or something, I'm fine with that. I can focus on the story, I get the content, and they get their ad impressions. If they want to break up my experience to maximize ads then I don't want to support that decision. The same goes for the Javascript advertising that highlights keywords in a story to popup some ad when you mouse over it, that's also not something I want to see.
So I'm not all gung-ho about ad blocking, I just don't like people telling me how I should use the internet to allow them to sustain their business model, because the reason I use the internet is not to help people make money. It also probably doesn't help that my opinion of marketers and the marketing profession is only slightly higher than my opinion of spammers.
Re:Extensions security? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a firefox extension I use called Property Bee. What it does is that every time I visit certain popular British and Irish real estate listing sites, such as Rightmove, it sends details of everything I look at on the site to a central server. In return, it tells me what all the other plug-in users saw when they looked at that particular property, so I can see a full history of all the changes the estate agent (realtor) has made to the listing, including price and description.
A plug in like that, which is totally up-front about what it does is fine, but the same technology that is used in that plug-in could be used for purposes that are definitely not OK.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but I like to be in control of my bandwidth usage and sanity level. Ads are more obnoxious than you can imagine and slow down my internet experience. It's not our job to fix or sustain your business model.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but using AdBlock is like using a nuclear weapon to go deer hunting.
So you went to ONE site that had ONE ad that slowed your browsing experience down. You install AdBlock, and suddenly it's blocking everything ever! Sure there's a whitelist, but there's no way to turn AdBlock off for all sites *except* for the one you had problems with.
I'd love to use AdBlock for the 3 or 4 sites I regularly visit that have bad ads, but there's no way to do that without blocking thousands of perfectly innocent sites. If AdBlock added a "blacklist" mode, I think they'd make everybody happier.
I'm not even saying they should get rid of the "whitelist" mode it currently has.
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:1, Insightful)
Before you tell me to get off your lawn, let me spell this out for you: relying exclusively on the digital equivalent of newspaper ads is a poor long-term strategy. Trying to sell content in a world where a perfect, untraceable digital copy can be made for free by anyone is a poor long-term strategy.
While you focus on the gradually-being-lost tradition of writing your textbooks, finding publishers, printing, stressing about royalties and then contemplating whether you should sue individuals or whatever big pockets you can find (as per your blog post "
What do I do about pirates stealing my books?" http://www.wayner.org/node/55 ), other people are moving on to more stable business models.
You need to diversify into other generatives. If you want to write, you need to use what you write to create streams of income that don't depend solely on content protection. Use it on your resume to get a high paying job. Use it to land speaking gigs. Use it to find a textbook publisher who will pay you up front, so that they, not you, end up on the wrong end of the stick. Use it to sell t-shirts, or laminated reference sheets.
If you can't stand all of those ideas, then focus on providing your information in a way that is better: more convenient, more personalized, faster. Then sell those characteristics that make it better. (Hint: Textbooks and articles aren't better anymore.)
Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score:2, Insightful)