This doesn't help at all for Safari extension development, though, because Catalyst apps don't support Safari extensions. Catalyst allows the very large pool of iOS developers to participate in Mac development. Nonetheless, I don't think the elimination of safariextz has been good overall for the Safari extension ecosystem, and perhaps my uncommon position makes me especially qualified to write an article discussing this problem.Īpple has been trying (mostly futilely) to "revive" Mac development via Catalyst, a technology that enables iPad apps to be directly ported to Mac. In a sense, I can't complain, because this bizarre situation has opened an opportunity for me personally, as a member of that very small developer pool. No wonder it's so hard to find Safari extensions nowadays. This is one of the smaller developer pools you can imagine. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that Safari extensions are to be created only by developers who are experts in both native Mac development and web development. And the intersection between Mac developers and web developers is smaller still. Mac developers themselves are unfortunately a dying breed, but even during the "glory days" of Mac OS X development (before iPhone), Mac developers were a small fraction of software developers, always vastly outnumbered by web developers. Safari extension developers still have to know web development, but they also have to know native Mac development. Safari is unique, unprecedented in its extension requirements. All these worlds are yours… except Safari! Attempt no landing there. In other words, almost any web developer in the world can create an extension for almost any web browser in the world. To create an extension for Firefox, Chrome, or any browser based on Chromium - Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi - you just need to know JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. ![]() I believe that the biggest barrier now to creating Safari extensions is not money but developer expertise. The developer program membership cost factor is obvious, so I won't spend any more time discussing that. There are significantly fewer Safari extensions available. Developers? Developers? Developers?Īs a result of the change in format from safariextz to app, Safari extensions have been decimated. However, a Safari app extension distributed outside the Mac App Store must be signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate, and it must also be notarized by Apple in order to run on macOS 10.15 Catalina. Safari extensions can be distributed in the Mac App Store, but developers also have the option to directly distribute a Safari extension on the web. (For comparison, Firefox has no extension developer fee, and the Chrome Web Store has a one-time $5 USD fee.)Ĭontrary to widespread misconception, Safari app extensions don't have to be distributed in the Mac App Store. There are fee waivers available to accredited nonprofit, educational, and government organizations, but the waivers require official documentation (a lot of red tape) and are not available to individuals such as hobbyist developers. Moreover, in order to distribute Safari extensions, developers must join the Apple Developer Program, which costs $99 USD per year, even for free Safari extensions. ![]() It's now impossible to create a Safari extension without also writing native code - Objective-C or Swift - and compiling the Safari app extension in Xcode on a Mac. Safari app extensions still use JavaScript and CSS like before, but standard web technologies are no longer sufficient. Instead, developers were told to create Safari app extensions, distributed in the app file format just like any other Mac app. Apple deprecated safariextz extensions with the release of Safari 12, and support for them was removed entirely with the release of Safari 13 in 2019. Since 2018, the Safari extensions situation has changed radically. Extensions were distributed in the safariextz file format either directly by the developer or by Apple in the Safari Extensions Gallery. ![]() Apple opened a free Safari Developer Program to allow developers to securely sign their extensions for distribution. By design, Safari extensions were very similar to Chrome and Firefox extensions, so it was feasible for a developer to write an extension for all of those browsers using standard web technologies: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Safari extensions were introduced in 2010 with the release of Safari 5. ![]() This blog post attempts to give an overview of what happened to Safari extensions in the past few years, from the perspective of a developer (me) with many years of experience working on Mac apps and Safari extensions. The decimation of Safari extensions Articles index The decimation of Safari extensions Maby Jeff Johnson
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