Chrome Web Store Will Show Badges For Reputable Developers and Extensions (xda-developers.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Google will start highlighting reputable developers and publishers with a special badge. Google wrote in an email to Chrome Web Store developers on Friday, "we're happy to announce two new extension badges to help us deliver on that goal: the Featured badge and the Established publisher badge. Both of these badges will appear in the store in the next few weeks. Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering, and may also see their extensions appear in special promotions both on and off Chrome Web Store." "Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering"
The first is a Featured badge, which "will be granted to extensions that follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design." This badge is given to extensions manually by the Chrome Web Store team, so there isn't a full (public) list of guidelines, but the email mentioned a clear store listing page and following best practices as some of the criteria. The Established publisher badge will be granted automatically to developers and publisher accounts that have been verified and "established a consistent positive track record with Google services and compliance with the Developer Program Policy." In other words, most developers that haven't broke Chrome Web Store rules will probably get the badge at some point.
Google says publishers will not be able to pay money for either badge, but the company is working on ways for developers to request consideration. Starting on April 20, developers will be able to nominate their own extensions for a Featured badge.
The first is a Featured badge, which "will be granted to extensions that follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design." This badge is given to extensions manually by the Chrome Web Store team, so there isn't a full (public) list of guidelines, but the email mentioned a clear store listing page and following best practices as some of the criteria. The Established publisher badge will be granted automatically to developers and publisher accounts that have been verified and "established a consistent positive track record with Google services and compliance with the Developer Program Policy." In other words, most developers that haven't broke Chrome Web Store rules will probably get the badge at some point.
Google says publishers will not be able to pay money for either badge, but the company is working on ways for developers to request consideration. Starting on April 20, developers will be able to nominate their own extensions for a Featured badge.
So how much (Score:1)
$1,000,000? $5,000,000?
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How much do you think Google sells those for? $1,000,000? $5,000,000?
Probably based on ad revenue generated for Google.
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What [cbsnews.com] are [cnn.com] you [yahoo.com] blabbering [inquirer.com] about [nytimes.com]?
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I was going for a humorous approach to this thread. I'm well aware the right violates the rules way more often than almost all other groups combined.
Translation (Score:1)
Do they disappear on ownership transfer? (Score:3)
Are these badges going to take that into account and stick to the people in control of the extension, rather than the extension itself, or will the same old game of operating the extension cleanly for a time, or purchasing it from an honest actor; and then springing a little surprise once you've accrued a decent reputation?
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Of course, reputable is relative.. (Score:3)
For example, Google marked the Android app that let you skip advertising on Youtube as 'malware', despite it not having any malicious behavior toward the user of the device.
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Actually the app turned users into people who were breaching the terms of service of Youtube, and caused parts of the video to be skipped. That doesn't make reputation relative, and it doesn't need to be just the user affected to be malicious.
Incidentally note the developer didn't get banned. Just the app. So your post is quite off topic.
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'Malware' is considered to be software acting counter to the user's expectations in a malicious way. A user going out of their way to install an ad-skipping youtube player and having ads skipped is not acting counter to the user's expectations. You may want to consider ad-blocking 'malicious' to Google, but if so, that's the user being 'malicious', the software is working as intended by the operator of the software.
Since the app in question was never in the app store and had to be sideloaded, there's no a
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I'm sorry, skipping through videos is not against the Terms of Service. If it was Google would disable the ability to scrub through a video and only let you play it linearly (like they do with shorts).
And the ability to skip through videos was disabled by default - you need to specifically enable SponsorBlock support and select you wish to skip sponsors (you can skip other
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"Interaction reminders" are a skippable thing in SponsorBlock too. There's also a 'skip to highlight' feature to try to overcome the meandering padding, and skip filler tangent, and skipping non-music section of music. Though whether the videos are adequately marked up or not for all this is not guaranteed (the downside of volunteer markup)
Ultimately some videos are just long-winded but technically on topic, and it's hard to piece together a good video through skipping.
Established Publisher badge would be helpful (Score:2)
The "Established Publisher" badge sounds pretty useful to buyers, I certainly would like to know that something I'm installing is coming from a development shop that knows what the rules and best practices are, and follows them.
The "Featured Publisher" badge would be useful to buyers only if it was crowd-sourced rather than just hand-picked by Google. As it stands, it's only useful to sellers, really. Knowing that the shop-keeper (Google) likes a particular brand isn't terribly persuasive. Knowing that the
We don't need no stinking badges (Score:3)
A lot of good these badges will do when a popular badged extension gets bought out by a scammer like the great suspender [slashdot.org] did.
A badge pledged by Google? (Score:2)
cesspool (Score:2)
Oh look, floaters in the cesspool.
Threats to Google's business model (Score:2)
I'll believe it when I see a fully functional version of uBlock Origin with the badge, and no loss of capabilities in June 2023.
Otherwise, there are too many conflicts of interest.
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Google has many handles to gatekeep on their platform, and yet they've exercised none of them against uBlock Origin. I look forward to you re-evaluating your biases in 2 months.
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On the other hand, they did go after Vanced, and marked it as malware in their anti-malware system, despite it not actually doing anything the user didn't want it to do.
I suspect they are more permissive on ad-block in the chorme store because they see their position on browser dominance as somewhat more tenuous (Edge, Vilvaldi, Brave, or Firefox could take off if Chrome became outright anti-adblock), but they have clearly demonstrated that if they have a tight control on the platform, they happily shoot do
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So it will be like that failed anti-social media site Truth Social? The one which says if you say anything bad about the con artist or the failed web site [hillreporter.com] you will be banned?