Yeah, this baffles me. I can't figure out why this still exists. I've got to imagine the volume of people paying that fee specifically to develop Safari extensions has to be low.

Thing is Safari is a nice browser to use, but without uBlock Origin it's a non-starter for me, all these 'content blocker' solutions are either bloated or nowhere near as good as uBlock Origin.

The irony of calling content blockers, which provide prebuilt block lists to the browser, to compile into an efficient format, “bloated” while suggesting that JavaScript extensions running before every single resource request to check if it should be blocked are not, is beyond ridiculous.

the fee exists, at least from what I have gleaned historically, to provide some mild barrier to people who would otherwise spam the App Store with crap. By building a modest amount of hoops, it keeps the laziest spammers out. (Also something about "paying to keep the lights on", as if AAPL needs money these days)

In practice, well, just search this site for threads about it. I'm not sure, like you indicate, it's worthwhile for the browser ecosystem.

Google Webstore has a one time fee of $5. Surely there is a more reasonable middle ground.

Not to mention the $700+ upfront hardware investment if you don't already have an Apple machine.

Most extensions could likely be built and tested just fine on a ~$250-$350 used Mac mini. That's probably still more money than should need to be spent, but a brand new machine probably isn't necessary in this particular case.

I was thinking on that. You still need peripherals if you're using a Mac Mini, though that's no different than if you were using another desktop. Still though, if you don't use, or don't want to use a Mac as your daily driver, that's a dedicated machine just to build/publish an extension for a browser. IMO, there's a slightly stronger case for iOS apps, but requiring that for a browser extension is much harder to justify.

It's not like you can use safari on Windows.

However, if you're the creator of a Firefox/Chrome extension, and want to utilize the WebExtension support in Safari, your deployment workflow can no longer be platform agnostic.

I've done this to build for MacOS, and it still becomes like a tax as the hardware ages out and Apple insists you have the latest OS to publish to their stores.