Mozilla announced that they would be working on Manifest v3 support almost a year ago. Mozilla set an ambitious deadline to provide developers a preview version in Q4 2021. And start accepting manifest v3 extensions submissions in early 2022. Eight months have passed. Where are we in 2022 March? Continue reading...

Some of Chrome extension API calls must be executed in the context of user gestures. Otherwise, the exception “This function must be called during a user gesture” is thrown and the API call fails. One such API is chrome.permissions.request. It allows developers to request optional permissions at runtime. We will use chrome.permission.request as the main example in this article. Continue reading...

If you are using the new optional permission API (chrome.permissions) you may have run into “Only permissions specified in the manifest may be requested” exception when requesting a permission at runtime. This is caused by missing a matching permission in the extension manifest. Permissions API only allows to request permissions that have already been declared in the manifest as optional. This makes sense, because otherwise an extension could keep requesting more and more permissions from the user without declaring use-cases during the extension review process. Continue reading...

Microsoft Edge Add-ons store is still in Beta, but it's quickly catching up to Google Chrome Web Store. One of the biggest pain points was the lack of any kind of analytics on how an extension is performing in the store. Knowing how many people installed your extension or how many weekly users you have might seem like a minimum bar, but it was missing in the Add-ons store. Continue reading...

Publishing your browser extension is a really exciting moment. The code you have been working on for a long time will be finally used by real people. And even with minimal marketing there is a high chance that you will get decent daily install numbers. At least for the first couple of months, that’s simply how the Web Store algorithm works. It gives a chance for new browser extensions to be discovered. As quickly as sudden popularity comes you will also quickly experience the other side of the coin - churn. Continue reading...