I scraped 2,000 Chrome extensions to find abandoned ones that still have users. Here's the pattern.

I kept noticing the same thing while browsing the Chrome Web Store: extensions with 100k+ users, hundreds of reviews, and a developer who clearly walked away years ago. The reviews are full of "this used to work," "please update," "does anyone still maintain this?" — and nobody answers.
That gap is interesting. High install base + active complaints + absent owner isn't a dead market. It's a market that's still alive but no longer served. Different from an extension nobody installs anymore, which is just dead.
So I built a small pipeline to find them at scale. Roughly the steps:

1. Pull a few thousand extensions and their public stats (installs, rating, last update).
2. Filter for the "abandoned but loved" shape — decent install base, rating slipping, no update in a long while.
3. Read the 1–2 star reviews and pull out what people are actually angry about — the specific missing feature or broken behavior, not just "it's bad."
   The thing I had to fix early: my first scoring rewarded "abandoned the longest." Wrong. An extension untouched for 8 years has lost its users — the complaints stopped because everyone left. The real opportunity is the one abandoned 12–24 months ago: long enough that the owner's clearly gone, recent enough that the users are still there and still annoyed.
   A few honest caveats I learned the hard way:

• High users + recent complaints = opportunity. Low users + silence = just dead. Don't confuse them.
• Some "abandoned" extensions are being quietly absorbed by the browser itself (tab features, etc). Forking those is building on melting ice.
• "Hard to copy" is the wrong question. "Does rebuilding this actually bring someone money/users" is the right one.
  Curious if others here have rebuilt an abandoned tool and how it went — did the existing angry user base actually migrate, or did you have to win them from scratch?
  (I ended up packaging the full list of opportunities I found into a small report — happy to share where if anyone wants it, but mostly posting because the "alive vs dead market" distinction took me a while to see and I figured it'd be useful here.)