Quiet Tabs
–
lived 1,233 days
Worked in every version of Chrome but the next one.
manifest v3
Candles are counted in this browser only.
1,233 days
born died
Autopsy
- Cause of death
- Dependency hell
- Stack recovered
- Last words
“bump manifest_version to 3, see what breaks”final commit · 3 June 2024
- Mood at death
- Denial
- Lines of code
- 2,950
Obituary
Quiet Tabs was a Chrome extension that put idle tabs to sleep after twenty minutes. It had 212 users, most of whom never opened its settings.
It depended on a background page that stayed awake. The new extension manifest did not allow background pages to stay awake. The migration guide was read several times.
On 3 June 2024 the manifest version was changed from 2 to 3 to see what would break. Everything did. The store listing was later taken down by the store, not by the author.
What it taught me
If a platform can remove me with a blog post, keep the logic that matters out of the platform's API.