chrome extension removes itself

[Prasad Cholakkottil]

Hello developers,

I have created an extension for people whose mother tongue is not English (to lookup definitions of words.) I have many happy users too. (link)

Two days ago, one of my users got an issues that the extension removes itself on every restart of chrome or computer, and he has to re-install the extension again. I tried to reproduce it on the Windows 8, chrome version 23.0.1271.97 and found no issues. (It works perfectly on Ubuntu 12.04, Mac Snow Leopard as well) I wonder if anybody in this group has ever come across such an issue from your users. Please let me know. Also, since I could not recreate the issues, any thoughts would be helpful too.

Issue found on:

Application version: 1.2.3

Client version: 5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.97 Safari/537.11
Reported date: 12/22/12 12:00 AM

Thanks

Prasad Cholakkottil

[Vladyslav Volovyk]

Dont know anything about kamikadzing self, yet maybe this might have relation:

http://blog.chromium.org/2012/12/no-more-silent-extension-installs.html

''' In addition, all extensions previously installed using external deployment options will be automatically disabled. Chrome will show a one-time prompt to allow the re-enabling of any of the extensions. '''

But i want to comment about the extension itself.

The mega useful idea behind this extension and the one I wanted to implement long ago.

But there is no way i can install something which declare access to all the data in my browser.

And I think many othere users also.

So please consider utilize the contextMenu API:

http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/contextMenus.html

When user select some word and invoke context menu the extension is notified and the selection is provided in the event - no need to declare so wide access rights.

Will be very cool to have such extension - hooking up some words in thesaurus 10 times in a day...

[Vladyslav Volovyk]

Installed your extension in a sandbox and found your already use the context menu... 
just curious - why need the "access all data on all websites"?

This might be an issue for your user - somebody who administrate the pc of this user maybe decide that such things is not worth to have on a work pc.

[Prasad Cholakkottil]

Thank you, Vladyslav. I will look in to the context menu API and edit the extension. In fact, I created this extension a few years ago and never looked into the new APIs. Thanks. :)

[Serge Strukoff]

Yes, i can confirm that this problem seems to exist. 

We have a real tech support, every day we answer a lot of questions to our users. 

Below is only a small part of the complaints from our users regarding topic question. 

All users have installed extensions from the Chrome Web Store so this doesn't have any relation to any external extension deployment options.

> ... extension removes itself ...

>I didn't remove it; your program removes itself!

> Why ... are blocked to isntall in chrome store for me? I`m using windows 8.

> ...

Such cases are markedly increased in November, probably due to the well-known events.

As a result our users wrote: I've uninstalled chrome...junk browser...etc.

I think, if Google will continue their "unknown" experiments with developers and users, 

this spring/summer, the use of all Google services will begin drop (without huge investments in advertising),

as more and more people are dissatisfied with the changes, unfortunately :(  

On Monday, December 24, 2012 5:26:16 AM UTC+2, Prasad Cholakkottil wrote:

[Vladyslav Volovyk]

Nice fake excuse... need remark for myself.

[Vladyslav Volovyk]

That is actually unbelievable how little most of the user cares about such issues.

Seems it is mostly have no any impact on success or as advantage against the competitors to not declare such right... sad.