Honestly, one of the things they need to do that nobody talks about is move Chrome(ium) extensions away from the Chrome web store. Mozilla, Brave, Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi and so on should really make a big, vendor-neutral web store to serve all their browsers. It’s always felt weird to me that all these browsers presumably have issues with Google in some way, yet all still rely on and use their extension distribution infrastructure.
I don’t even mean to permanently switch; Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. should just let you install extensions from either the Chrome Web Store, Mozilla’s add-on’s store or some other trusted site on an extension by extension basis.
EDIT: Okay, I should have checked things before posting this. Apparently most browsers have their own extension stores, but also support Chrome’s. I guess I assumed that them supporting the CWS meant that they only supported the CWS. Sorry about that.
Still, a big vendor neutral cross browser extensions store would be nice.
However, they still need to distribute different packages, at least for the time being. But I can see a hypothetical unified store just letting you pick between the “Mozilla” or “Chromium” versions of extensions (perhaps automatically, based on your browser).
Honestly, one of the things they need to do that nobody talks about is move Chrome(ium) extensions away from the Chrome web store. Mozilla, Brave, Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi and so on should really make a big, vendor-neutral web store to serve all their browsers. It’s always felt weird to me that all these browsers presumably have issues with Google in some way, yet all still rely on and use their extension distribution infrastructure.
I don’t even mean to permanently switch; Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. should just let you install extensions from either the Chrome Web Store, Mozilla’s add-on’s store or some other trusted site on an extension by extension basis.
EDIT: Okay, I should have checked things before posting this. Apparently most browsers have their own extension stores, but also support Chrome’s. I guess I assumed that them supporting the CWS meant that they only supported the CWS. Sorry about that.
Still, a big vendor neutral cross browser extensions store would be nice.
Problem with that is Firefox and Chrome (for example) aren’t the same browser under the hood and need different extension code to function
You couldn’t just use the Mozilla download of UBlock on Chrome, it’d have to be the Chrome addon served through Mozilla servers
Think of it like a phone economy: you can only install apps (extensions/add-ons) for your device (browser)
The chromium ones could all just use a single repository though I’m P sure, that’d work fine
Actually, modern extensions are rather similar between browsers, thanks to the WebExtensions API that was created a while ago. Mozilla even has a porting guide and list of differences: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-a-google-chrome-extension/
However, they still need to distribute different packages, at least for the time being. But I can see a hypothetical unified store just letting you pick between the “Mozilla” or “Chromium” versions of extensions (perhaps automatically, based on your browser).