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One of my Opera (Presto web engine, European owned) extension was featured on the front page and became very popular. Somebody wanted to purchase it from me for a good amount. During the negotiation, I said I would take down the extension and provide all source code to them so they could distribute it themselves. They said they expected me to hand over my Opera extension account credential too to them. Long story short, I backed out.

So yeah, I support your assertion that while something like this is somewhat useful, a better thing would be some kind of malware scanner for extensions.

3 comments

Unfortunately, it probably even makes sense that they'd want that for non-nefarious reasons.

If you shut down your extension and they had to put up their own copy, they'd have to re-acquire your installed base. That could be a sharp decline in value to them, particularly if the extension mostly got popular off a one-time front-page feature rather than via gradual discovery with active word of mouth.

The chance that people jump through all the hoops to impulse-install again twice is low. They'd have to really like your extension, even if your version notified them of shutdown of yours and availability of the new one. Growing an installed base is generally more a factor of not chasing your users away than explicitly doing things to retain them. That change would chase them away.

In an ideal world, you'd be able to officially transfer the single extension to a new owner while keeping all the installed users--preferably with a notice dialog enforced by the browser popping up to tell the user the ownership changed and offering them a chance to uninstall. That would also chase some users away, but it's sort of the ethical minimum (hence this HN post).

But I doubt many browsers, if any, work like that.

Both CWS (Chrome) and AMO (Firefox) supports this. It's part of Chrome's One Stop Support[1] form and Forefox's developer hub UI.

At the moment I don't believe any browser has features that notify end users of ownership changes.

[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/one_stop_... [2]: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-o....

True, I understood that the userbase was more important to them as my extension code was already released under GPL open source license. I was concerned about the following:

1. It was a grey area if the Terms of Service allowed such transfers of Opera account.

2. I had many other extensions that were being distributed through the same Opera account.

3. My suggestion to them was that I would release a new version of the extension from my account that explicitly informs the user of the change of ownership, and also inform them to install the extension from the new owners Opera account. They weren't interested in that.

> a notice dialog enforced by the browser popping up to tell the user the ownership changed and offering them a chance to uninstall

Couldn't the extension do that itself? Why does it need to be a browser feature?

Edit: Quoted portion of comment I was responding to.

> Couldn't the extension do that itself? Why does it need to be a browser feature?

The reason for wanting such notifications in the first place is because new owners often do dodgy things, and a company that specialises in buying up popular extensions and cramming them full of spyware typically doesn't want you to know about the change of ownership.

So extension authors can't be relied upon to provide this feature. The ones you particularly want to know about go out of their way to hide their involvement.

But then wouldn't those new owners just avoid the notification entirely by buying the original developer's account so there's no way to tell that ownership changed? I'm pretty sure that's how it usually works already, so any notification system would necessarily have to be voluntary.

To my knowledge no browser supports transferring an extension's user base from one extension to another. If you want your users to switch, the only think you can do is show them a link of where to get the new extension they should install.

The GGP suggested "officially transfer the single extension to a new owner" which you can obviously already do (by giving the new owner your account, if nothing else), and "tell the user the ownership changed and offering them a chance to uninstall" can already be done by any extension that has any sort of UI. You don't need to "[transfer] an extension's user base from one extension to another".

The extension could do that itself, but it's possible that the new owner of the extension has hijacked the extension or otherwise has nefarious intent. Forcing the browser to announce this change alerts the user of this possibility.

Isn't Opera chinese owned these days?

I interviewed at their office and at the time their business was to use the high user count the browser had on mobiles in africa to push microcredit.

> Isn't Opera chinese owned these days?

Opera is a public company. Almost all public companies have shareholders from all over the world, including China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company) has some details.

EDIT: that Wikipedia article says Opera is indeed a public company, but it's only indirectly publicly traded via a chain of parent companies.

Almost all public companies have shareholders from all over the world, including China.

While Opera might not be a Chinese company in the strictest definition, over 50% of Opera's shares are owned by their Chinese parent company, and by all accounts around 80% of the shares still seem to be in control of the Chinese conglomerate that owned Opera before it went public.

The CEO and Co-CEO appear to have Chinese names, same with the parent company listed in your wiki link.

You might want to stress that Opera is Chinese-controlled then; which is different from Chinese-owned.

(Eg Google is controlled by its founders, who still have the majority of share voting rights and are in power as executives. But it's not majority owned by them anymore.)

So what? The CFO is Norwegian.

Since the CEO of Wikipedia is Egyptian born, would you define Wikipedia as Egyptian owned? Note that Egypt is a US backed dictatorship.

Yes, Opera was sold to the Chinese. I am talking about the days when Opera was owned by the Europeans, and didn't use Chromium / Blink engine.

Back when it was an innovative browser

While I too would back out from anything requiring giving away credentials, is there no other way to transfer ownership? A charitable interpretation could be that they wanted to also buy the "popularity" of the extension simply for discoverability.

But it's equally easy to envision nefarious reasons of course.

My bet is that code on its own with due respect is most likely easy to replicate. Couple months of dev work and most likely done.

User base and trust doesn’t work that way. I cannot hire 10 devs to replicate years of building trust and brand reputation.

My idea is that non-nefariously buyer discounted code part and valued trust and user base.

Should you be able to transfer trust and userbases that way? It feels like usually acquisitions trying to do this create a worse experience for users in some way or another.

This is a good point, and transferring of trust is a very interesting concept. But while I agree that these things shouldn’t necessarily be silently transferable, I also think there should be an easy way to onboard users to the new owner/extension (if they wish to) without having them need to think about it and manually go figure it out. It shouldn’t be silent, but it also shouldn’t be a pain. Acquisitions do often make things much worse eventually for users, but negating this by complicating the process of retaining them (especially if they want to be retained) isn’t great, either.

Even if you try to keep it known, it’s easy enough to have an LLC own the extension and keys, and then sell that LLC.

And if you tie it to individuals, then an extension is transferred every time a new employee replaces an old.