Chrome for Developers

Not quite, one has to nominate their extension/apply for it(fill a form, via the dev support centre)[0], for the CWS team to then review it, where after 3-4 weeks they usually grant it - you mainly have to have a "good" listing and "follow best practices" [1]. You can only apply once every 6 months.

In my opinion, either mass reporting, or (unlikely) a manual decision caused them to lose it. And after a while Honey likely applied again, where the reviewer was possibly unaware of past events. Or they were but it's not relevant to the review process. (Having millions of users may have played a part, the bigger exts might be treated differently, though I doubt it). Google doesn't really pay much mind to these things, from what I've seen.

[0] I'm pretty sure there's a dev doc somewhere with this

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/discovery#featured-badge

I prefer web apps to native apps any day. However, web apps are limited by what they can do.

But what they can do is not consistent - for example, it can take your picture and listen to your microphone if you give permissions; but it can't open a socket. Another example: Chrome came out with an File System Access API [2] in August; it's fantastic (I am using it) and it allows a class of native apps to be replaced by Web Apps. As a user, I don't mind having to jump through hoops (as a user) and giant warning screens to accept that permission - but I want this ability on the Web Platform.

For Web Apps to be able to complete with native apps, we need more flexibility Mozilla. [1]

[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file-system-access

What makes the browser slow and inefficient is the fact that it's not a UI framework. It's a system to display text and a couple of images on a 2D plane where every element depends on every other element.

Almost every single interaction and change requires the browser to recalculate the layout of the entire page and to redraw it. It's basically Microsoft Word, with nearly the same behaviors.

And there are no proper ways to prevent that behaviour. No lower and low level control over rendering. Awkward workarounds and hacks that browsers employ to try and minimize re-layouting and redrawing. Great rejoicing when introducing yet more hacks for basic things: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/animate-to-height-auto etc.

> LLMs are also terrible at these new standards.

This seems like a common enough issue that it would be worthwhile publishing a "Markdown library" of "stuff HTML can do" that you can "call" from your AGENTS.md.

Edit: lol, a sibling commenter shows I am not the first to have this idea! https://developer.chrome.com/docs/modern-web-guidance/get-started

(They made it a skill, which brings me to another thing I've had on my mind lately: that's annoying if you know when you start the harness that you will want it to read the skill. It's a roundtrip through the model to activate it. But maybe there's a way to fix that?)

(Edit2: Claude says if you activate the skill via /skill-name in the initial prompt, you get what I want)

Thankfully, since then, Chrome and all other major browsers now ask the user for permission before letting websites send requests to localhost or any local IP addresses. Obviously some users may click through that, but it prevents the behavior from being invisible to the user at least, and gives them a way to say no.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access

PS: I still recommend never installing Meta apps on your phone.

PPS: There are legitimate uses of this functionality, so as a web dev I'm happy the functionality wasn't silently blocked. This gives an opportunity to explain to the user why the permission is needed if the use is legitimate. Would be nice if it could be further scoped though.

> You are conflating disk and memory.

I never conflated anything. I said it's a neglible amount of space for current hardware, which I still believe.

If anything, the fact that I think the amount of space is acceptable for the amount of ram a modern laptop has exaggerates the point.

> There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.

That's the approach they take for most of their features.

> But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.

Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api