> Compatibility: Because extensions hook into websites in unsupported ways, updates to websites often result in extensions temporarily breaking, and extension authors scrambling to fix them.
Has anyone who's built a browser extension solved this?
The best you can do is get an early warning by running your extension via an automation framework and getting alerts on errors then publishing a fix and waiting for approval from Google.
Too many unknown unknowns. You're searching for an element to modify or take an action on based on the text content/class/id/aria-label/type? Someone changed apple to train. Or completely changes the element hierarchy. How would you predict or recognize that to modify your logic and be certain it works before publishing to your hundreds/thousands/millions of users?
The "read and change all your data" permission is a huge hurdle for our shopping extension, especially since we only need to identify shopping pages. What I've tried to build trust is to open source our tracking analytics (e.g. https://github.com/Score-Extension/score-extension-analytics...).
Hopefully transparency is one way to overcome this trust barrier.
We have the same issue. We have a browser extension that wants to extract data from given web pages (retailers, like yours), but there is no API to declare "I want to look at the content of this page only if the URL matches this pattern" or "Let me have a look at the URL and I will tell you if I want to look at the page content". It's unfortunately "all the web" or nothing.
Ended up saving thousands of dollars for myself so far (I shop a lot online), and friends & family really love the product. We also applied to YC – so let's see how that goes!
Baird is an amazing person. I've had the chance of talking to him and seeking advice while building out my own podcasting platform (https://kyrie.fm), and he's given invaluable feedback to younger, budding entrepreneurs. Great job Baird and team! Hope to see the platform grow even larger.
Has anyone who's built a browser extension solved this?