When we finally started looking into porting our extension to Firefox we found that we had to make zero changes to the code. We didn't know exactly how large that cost would be, but we suspected that there would be enough differences between the two browsers that it'd be a bit of a hassle to maintain them both.īoy were we wrong. A day later it was accepted.Ī Firefox version of our browser extension had long been on our list, but for the first little while it didn't feel worth the additional support cost. We committed the 1 line diff removing the activeTab permission and resubmitted. They had rejected our extension 6 times with no detail because of a technicality. And, sure, we had asked for activeTab when we didn't need it, but that permission didn't grant us any more functionality. The line that all of their emails repeated was "Request access to the narrowest permissions necessary". This discovery made the Chrome review team's communications far more frustrating in retrospect. We weren't opening up any new functionality, we were just asking for a redundant permission. So the activeTab permission was redundant. Here's a timeline of our interaction:Īt this point I dig into Chrome's documentation once again with a fine-tooth comb and I make a discovery: we had been requesting both the tabs and activeTab permissions, but since we also requested permission to run on it turns out that the features made available by activeTab were a strict subset of the features made available by tabs. To be clear: changing the name was the only change we made.Ī few days later we received a rejection email. We renamed the extension and submitted it from our new company account. We also took the time at this point to create a company Google account. After some more development and discussion, we re-framed our idea as an app to make custom keyboard shortcuts and we decided to rename Otto to Keysmith. I submitted the browser extension to Chrome under my own personal account, and after a review process of a couple days it was accepted. After a few months worth of nights and weekends we had an alpha version we were ready to share with friends.
AFTER EFFECTS KEYSMITH MAC
Otto consisted of two parts: a Mac app and a browser extension. In January 2020 my buddy and I started working on an idea we had for an automation app. In a world of walled gardens watched over by heavy handed reviewers, Firefox's review process was laughably good.
It wasn’t until I submitted the same extension to the Firefox Add-Ons Store that I saw just how good things could be. I've seen quite a few people complaining lately about the Kafkaesque Chrome extension review process, so when I started running into my own problems with the Chrome Web Store I wasn't exactly surprised. It's time to port your extension to Firefox February 12th, 2021