Trying to download certain Safari extensions and they show up as Apps in my App Store purchase history, and appear in the applications folder. The only question I have is: Why? This is so unnecessary for some of these plugins (Why does Adblock need to be its own app?) it just sits there in the applications folder taking up space when it doesn't need to. Can't you just install it like any other browser? Unless there's some grand plan here that I can't see this just seems absolutely absurd to me. This is one of many things in Safari that's annoying me so I'm very close to just giving it up. If anyone has any explanation or knows Apple's given reasoning for having extensions as App Store apps please chime in.
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Safari extensions are an app?
- Thread starter retta283
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Warning: not an explanation why, but more a history and a few thoughts
Apple, in the name of user privacy, forced all Safari Extension to move to a Safari App Extension framework with Safari 13 (on macOS Catalina). This broke every single Safari Web Extension back in 2019, but gave Apple more power to enforce certain privacy and security measures.
While not a terrible idea on the surface, it meant that a great many Safari Extensions simply vanished with developers not wanting to invest the time and effort to maintain them and Apple eventually heard the community. With Safari 14 the decision was reversed and developers now have a command line tool to convert a Web Extension to a Safari App Extension.
They still end up as an app in your applications folder and the only good reason for that is that you have a single place to uninstalls apps from
You mentioned it using up space and you have a point there - a web extension is mainly HTML, JavaScript and CSS and some JSON files and are rather tiny, while App Extensions can be significantly larger. However, if your extension is part of another app that you already use, it is a convenient delivery mechanisms that ensures that things that belong together are kept together.
As a developer it allows me to hook into a few APIs like iCloud that can be quite beneficial. I have a Safari App Extension (Open Access Helper www.oahelper.org) that helps students and academics find open access copies of otherwise paywalled scientific articles. There's a version for iOS / iPadOS and macOS and all versions are free.
On iOS / iPadOS you can "bookmark" an article and then, if you'd like, the App Extension can show you those bookmarks. I could easily have done this through something like Firebase or any number of others tools, but there is one really beautiful aspect of this: I don't get to see ANY of the data and thus don't have to worry about it.
The data is stored within Apple's system, in an area, that I, as a developer, cannot peek into and that gives the user the confidence to bookmark and me the confidence to offer the feature, without the legal headaches.
For the consumer it means that there is a single place to get those extensions, a single place on how to see them update and if I pay for them, there is a single way to do that, and if there ever was a malicious extension, Apple has a single pathway of stopping it from running.
Having said all that, I think Apple could have made different decisions, so that there would be a thriving market place rather than one that kind of limps along.
Apple, in the name of user privacy, forced all Safari Extension to move to a Safari App Extension framework with Safari 13 (on macOS Catalina). This broke every single Safari Web Extension back in 2019, but gave Apple more power to enforce certain privacy and security measures.
While not a terrible idea on the surface, it meant that a great many Safari Extensions simply vanished with developers not wanting to invest the time and effort to maintain them and Apple eventually heard the community. With Safari 14 the decision was reversed and developers now have a command line tool to convert a Web Extension to a Safari App Extension.
They still end up as an app in your applications folder and the only good reason for that is that you have a single place to uninstalls apps from
You mentioned it using up space and you have a point there - a web extension is mainly HTML, JavaScript and CSS and some JSON files and are rather tiny, while App Extensions can be significantly larger. However, if your extension is part of another app that you already use, it is a convenient delivery mechanisms that ensures that things that belong together are kept together.As a developer it allows me to hook into a few APIs like iCloud that can be quite beneficial. I have a Safari App Extension (Open Access Helper www.oahelper.org) that helps students and academics find open access copies of otherwise paywalled scientific articles. There's a version for iOS / iPadOS and macOS and all versions are free.
On iOS / iPadOS you can "bookmark" an article and then, if you'd like, the App Extension can show you those bookmarks. I could easily have done this through something like Firebase or any number of others tools, but there is one really beautiful aspect of this: I don't get to see ANY of the data and thus don't have to worry about it.
The data is stored within Apple's system, in an area, that I, as a developer, cannot peek into and that gives the user the confidence to bookmark and me the confidence to offer the feature, without the legal headaches.
For the consumer it means that there is a single place to get those extensions, a single place on how to see them update and if I pay for them, there is a single way to do that, and if there ever was a malicious extension, Apple has a single pathway of stopping it from running.
Having said all that, I think Apple could have made different decisions, so that there would be a thriving market place rather than one that kind of limps along.
There is no reason for them to be apps in the Mac App Store though. They could very easily create a Safari Extensions store just as Firefox and Chrome (and I assume all other browsers) have and this would be a nonissue. Having them as apps that actually appear in Launchpad and the Applications folder is an unnecessary complication. No one is actually going to launch an extension. Safari still has an extensions manager right in the menu bar drop-down.
In fact, this is the way it was in Safari until recently. I don't know for sure when this became the case but I assume since late 2018. Using the latest version of Safari under El Capitan (recently) I was able to download certain extensions and they worked just as any browser extension should. Downloading these same extensions under the latest version of Safari for Sierra (and Big Sur) they download as an app in the MAS. I assumed I could just delete the app or move it out of Applications but this breaks the extension. This is pretty much nitpicking, but the whole thing seems silly to me.
In fact, this is the way it was in Safari until recently. I don't know for sure when this became the case but I assume since late 2018. Using the latest version of Safari under El Capitan (recently) I was able to download certain extensions and they worked just as any browser extension should. Downloading these same extensions under the latest version of Safari for Sierra (and Big Sur) they download as an app in the MAS. I assumed I could just delete the app or move it out of Applications but this breaks the extension. This is pretty much nitpicking, but the whole thing seems silly to me.