A couple of weeks ago CrossRider, one of the biggest players among cross browser extension development platforms, has updated their users about termination of the service. It is difficult to say why exactly they has decided to do that. Most likely, a such decision was caused by too aggressive monetization strategy (for the most of people CrossRider become synonym of adware).
Anyway, this platform really convenient for a small projects. It was used for a thousands of the different extensions. And now the extensions owners need to find some solution which will allow them to keep their projects alive and don’t loose their users. However, this is not a trivial question. First of all, because there are no alternative projects of a such high quality. The similar projects (Kangoo, Conduit) are quite obsolete or too expensive. Secondly, some of alternative projects (Kynetx) was already sold or closed by their owners too. So, there is a high risk to get the same problems as they got with CrossRider.
It seems that the most effective solution in this case is to forget about cross browser extension development platforms or frameworks at all and take a look at the native extensions development. Fortunately, this is not so difficult like a couple of years ago. The modern web browsers constantly improves their extensions development API. So, most likely, at one day we will need to create a browser extension for one browser only and it will work on the other browsers too. In fact, this time is not so far away as you may expected. In the next article we will share with you the last trends in the browser extensions development world.
As for now, if you need to rewrite your CrossRider extension for some other platform, just press the button below and we will help you to do that.