Chrome Extension Opportunity
I wrote a post on my thoughts around Chrome’s timeline and forcing extensions to migrate to manifest v3. Since the Web Store is full of extensions that have not been updated in years, I see this as a huge opportunity for new extensions to take their place. Check out my post and let me know if you agree: https://timleland.com/migrate-chrome-extensions-to-manifest-v3/
Trending on Indie Hackers
Thanks for sharing your insight @timleland
Any pointers on where to start looking? I will be grateful if you can share some resources on this
Here's a list of nearly 8000 Chrome Extensions and their popularity etc. I'm not sure how up to date the data is. It was part of a project that Jakob Greenfeld (@jakobgreenfeld) did called Product Explorer that was then purchased and given away for free by Andrew Gazdecki of MicroAcquire.
https://airtable.com/shrJGfGXWCHzd3ZRm/tbl1rKIQfrma4rSLf
That's very useful Craig, thanks for sharing
Besides manually searching, you could take a look at @Glench's CSV of the top extensions and find some that have not been updated recently.
Thanks Tim, I missed Glench comment, checking his CSV now
No worries let me know if you find any interesting extensions.
I will
This is a really good observation! I may dip my toes into remaking some of the extensions that get disabled! Here's a CSV of every extension so you can easily find ones that you might want to replace (you can sort by date last updated and number of users).
And one thing I really love about my own project ExtensionPay is that adding paid features to extensions becomes trivially easy. I've already used it in several extensions :)
Very cool, Glench! Your spreadsheet is great for finding the extensions that may be forgotten and not updated to the new manifest version. How often do you update it?
Is it tho? Been thinking on this for a few days and I'm leaning more and more towards thinking of this as grave robbing.
Not only you are taking over work unrelated to you, you would also inherit all kinds of legal and ip issues that would be very easy to defend should the skeleton wake up. And forget being able to convince an investor.
Thoughts?
I am not saying steal code or IP. Several popular extensions are simple utilities that have not been updated in years. If they are deactivated, this will open up opportunities to build a new better version. Users would be searching for a replacement, and users would find your replacement. I could be wrong on this, but it's just a theory I had.
Good observation. Also to note, MV3 currently totally restricts server-side processing or phoning-home functionality within the extensions to tighten the security and I believe this would render a lot of extensions extinct.
I just updated my extension to MV3. Few of the Chrome APIs are still in a broken state but eventually Google should iron out the issues. Please let me know if you'd be interested in finding some opportunities to collaborate on reviving/building new extensions based on MV3.
That's a great suggestion, I am down to collaborate as well. We can start with brainstorming and then filtering out to find promising ones
what's the best way to get in touch?
you can DM me on twitter at @husseinzchi