It appears the extensions harvested a lot of information about their users and sent it all back to Avast – including URLs of sites visited, along with a per-device unique ID. The extensions were booted out of Mozilla's web store for breaking its privacy rules. Cast your mind back to December and you may recall antivirus-maker Avast ran into trouble with its Firefox add-on.

Johnson attributed Google's lack of communication with developers for the current situation, where a large number of developers encounter problems due to a sudden policy change and have nowhere to turn for help. There is email, but when they finally respond – if they ever do respond – you get the feeling that the response was written by AI rather than a real person.' 'Google seems to want to automate things as much as possible and avoid employing human staff,' he continued.

'With the Chrome Web Store, however, my updates can take up to a week to get reviewed, and if something goes wrong, you're almost hopelessly lost.' 'The Mac App Store usually reviews my updates within 24 hours, and if something goes wrong, I can contact support and get a response within a reasonable amount of time,' he said. Johnson said that he has a Safari app extension in the Mac App Store and while developer support isn't great, the Chrome Web Store is worse and feels understaffed – a charge other software makers have made.

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