Hudson: Google's Single-Purpose Policy Stifled Chrome Extension Business Models
Ryan Hudson · HONEY Founder Responds to MegaLag -- Ryan Hudson on TBPN · Apr 9, 2025 · at 14:38
Honey co-founder Ryan Hudson analyzes why few large venture-scale companies exist in the Chrome extension ecosystem outside of Honey and Grammarly.
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“And it's a single purpose arbitrary policy that Google has for the Chrome store that extensions are only allowed to do one thing. And so extensions have effectively been pushed to only do a feature and it becomes increasingly challenging to attach a business model to that feature. And so to me, that's the disconnect that they've strategically divided the utility from the monetization side of it, and there's historically good reasons why you might want to do that in some cases, and people are abusing it, and like there's, there was abusive behavior when people, before this policy came in, but I think it really slammed the door on a lot of other interesting models that people would have for a browser extension, and basically to this day you have honey, honey, and shopping tools,”
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