What does it take to create a browser plugin? Are you making browser plugins/extensions? Share it, and your story why you've made it

We just (soft) launched our Chrome extension: Browse AI Recorder
It lets you record your actions on sites, take screenshots, and capture texts (soon). It then uploads the recording to our server on AWS and we can run them for you on the cloud whenever you want.
A couple of use-cases:

• Monitor your competitor's site and get an email notification when they change their pricing or UX
• Have Browse AI login to your site and perform actions every day, and send you an email notification as soon as something is broken
• Automate actions like how Zapier does, except you can do it on any site, without coding.

This was the first Chrome extension I've ever written, and it's probably one of the most complex ones out there. I used React and CRA under the hood for UIs, an AWS Lambda as the backend API endpoint, and AWS S3 as the storage for recordings.

I found Google's official documentation for extension development quite good. There were only a few things that weren't answered there (like the review process and common rejection reasons) which I found out about on the official Google Group.

It took me and another full-time developer about 8 months to develop the extension, the backend, the dashboard, and the marketing site. It was a pretty massive project.

Let me know if you have any questions about my experience developing and publishing the extension. I'd be happy to help.

I worked on the Datawallet 3.0 - Developer Edition extension at my previous company.

Pretty cool stuff:

• redux to help manage extension/page messaging
• extensive cryptography usage for encrypting big files and storing them on local file system
• loading iframes, handling authentication and scraping data from various sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc)
• exposing a GraphQL API for querying data in a privacy preserving way.

A lot of things I learned at that company and while working on the project that required this extension prompted me to create Portabella once I left.

I made this small Chrome extension for Dribbble, it lets you preview full size shots on hover, without having to open it. I've made it because I needed it and the available extensions were either not working anymore or not supporting gifs and videos.

Writing the code took few hours - it's really very simple extension. And then I spent some time with other things around it, like creating the icon and other graphical assets, making a showcase video, making posts etc. So the whole process from start to finish took maybe 2 days.

When it comes to learning resources, the official Google documentation and stackoverflow were sufficient in my case.

Because I'm just experimenting for a possible bigger project, later, I named it URL Rat to keep other people from trying to use it for non-educational purposes. But it takes each visited address and sends it off to a configurable URL for (hypothetical) logging and analysis. Because that's a terrible idea, especially security-wise, I doubt it'll ever appear in the marketplaces for such things...

For anybody who might want an explanation of how the pieces fit together, I documented the base functionality in a blog post and will be publishing a second post about implementing browser storage on Wednesday.

It's a surprisingly relaxing process. I only had a couple of points where I felt like I was beating my head against the wall, and the bigger one (browser storage for the configuration) was because I didn't read.