Unlike other browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, all Safari Web Extensions are distributed as part of a standard iOS or macOS application. The following year, Safari 15 brought Web extension support to iOS for the first time. With the release of Safari 14 for macOS, the browser added support for Web extensions developed with the Chrome API. Until 2020, Apple was the lone major exception to this trend, as its API for Safari required using the Xcode tool to create extensions. Firefox extensions are now largely compatible with their Chrome counterparts. In 2015, the organization announced that the long-standing XUL and XPCOM extension capabilities of Firefox would be replaced with a less-permissive API very similar to Chrome's. With its own market share in decline, Mozilla also decided to conform. (Chromium is Google's open-source project that serves as the functional core of Chrome and many other browsers.) Now that Edge has the same API as Chrome, extensions can be installed directly from the Chrome Web Store. But after three years Edge still had a disappointingly small market share, so Microsoft rebuilt it as a Chromium-based browser. īecause of Chrome's success, Microsoft created a very similar extension API for its Edge browser, with the goal of making it easy for Chrome extension developers to port their work to Edge. In the same year, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer as the world's most popular browser, and its market share continued to grow, reaching 60% in 2018. As of June 2012, there were 750 million total installations of extensions and other content hosted on the store. Beta testing for this capability began in 2009, and the following year Google opened the Chrome Web Store. While that goal is unlikely to be achieved, the majority of browsers already use the same or very similar APIs due to the popularity of Google Chrome.Ĭhrome was the first browser with an extension API based solely on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In 2015, a community working group formed under the W3C to create a single standard application programming interface (API) for browser extensions. Microsoft Edge added extension support in 2016.

Opera began supporting extensions in 2009, and both Google Chrome and Safari did so the following year. Firefox has supported extensions since its launch in 2004. Internet Explorer was the first major browser to support extensions, with the release of version 4 in 1999.

The most popular browser, Google Chrome, has over 100,000 extensions available but no longer supports plug-ins. As of 2021, plug-ins have been deprecated by most browsers, while extensions are widely used. The main difference is that extensions are usually just source code, but plug-ins are always executables (i.e. Browser plug-ins are a separate type of module.

Firefox add on youtube dislike