Bad developer experience to package/distribute Edge WebExtension

[slorber]

Hi,

I don't really know how to contact Edge developers officially so I'd like to explain my pains somewhere. Developing a WebExtension in Edge with dev flag enabled and sideloading works fine (at least for the few API's I'm using), but the documentation/packaging/distribution part is really confusing.

I understand that you limit the publication of Edge extensions to only a few companies for now (including Pocket/Evernote/Adblock etc...). My company has an extension very similar to Pocket/Evernote and we'd like to distribute it in an easy way. We don't care if it's on the Windows store, we don't want to maintain a list of users allowed to download this extension, we don't want to ask users to enable dev features + sideload + confirm that they still want the extension to run on every Edge startup.

So I think I'm in a quite common usecase, yet I don't know how to distribute my extension in a correct way. I am able to generate an unsigned .appx with ManifoldJS by using commands of the documentation, but I'm unable to upload it to the store due to not being allowed to use the type "com.microsoft.edge.extension" (probably on purpose).

If this documentation is only limited to the very few developers (from Pocket/Evernote) allowed to publish the extension, why are you publishing it publicly like if it was targeting everybody? If it actually targets everybody then is there any appropriate way to distribute an Edge extension, when publishing to store is forbidden, LOB distribution seems unappropriate, and sideloading would be very bad UX?

Another thing: I noticed I am able to doubleclick on my extension .appx unfortunatly it's unsigned so Windows10 refuses to install the appx. I tried using the ManifoldJS -S option to sign the generated package but got an error:

The CloudAppX service returned an error - Not Found (404): Cannot POST /v3/buildsigned

This -S option is not even mentionned in Edge extension packaging doc, which references outdated doc pages using deprecated MakeCert.exe. Even if I finally succeed to sign my .appx I still have no idea what this will bring me because it's not mentionned anywhere if distributing .appx to users directly is a correct way to distribute Edge extension (I suspect it will be considered as sideloading: fail)

Also not sure why, the generated manifest does not automatically reference the logos that we already setup inside the WebExtension, instead of generating new default logos in the Assets folder

[boyofgreen]

Hi @slorber thanks for reaching out and providing this great data. I'm adding @am385 to the issue who works directly with the Edge Extensions. He can point you in the right direction.

[slorber]

Hi and thanks @boyofgreen

I've noticed these 2 Edge extensions which probably didn't get permission from Microsoft to publish to the store.

• FBPurity: http://www.fbpurity.com/install.htm
• Tweeten: http://tweeten.xyz/edge/

Yet they still try to do like me and distribute their extensions by using sideloading, but this seems very bad for user experience to enable dev features + confirming extension usage on restart.

Also this PCWorld link mentions that it's possible to publish our extension to the windows store in beta, but the extension wouldn't be "searchable" and the user would need the extension link directly. Our company is perfectly fine with such distribution system, because people in our case would always create an account on our website first, and extension requires a login/password anyway.

So, how can I distribute my extension in beta like stated in this article?

Is this PCWorld article saying the truth? Because the extension doc does not mention this distribution system, and I can indeed see the TemperMonkey extension mentionned in the article being listed on this page so it actually may be officially allowed to publish to the store...

Also want to add that yesterday I successfully signed my .appx but then double clicking on it was still refused because breaking the certificate chain. I suspect this is due to having used a self-signed certificate (like it's actually advised in doc I've found). It would be cool for me to host an installable .appx on my own CDN and distribute it this way, as long as users can double click on it to install the Edge extension but I'm not sure it's supposed to work this way.

Thanks in advance

[slorber]

As my extension code is really simple (just loads an iframe in current page), I try as a last resort to get approved faster with support. Just wondering the reasons why approving so few extensions at this time, is it to be able to ensure extension quality, and make sure new extension APIs are working fine before approving extensions using them? Because in my case the APIs usage is so low and common that I guess it could be approved safely:

browser.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function onActionButtonClicked(tab) {
    browser.tabs.executeScript({file: "/clipper.js"});
});