Quick update about the Safari extension (this is Stefan, CEO and founder). I think it’s easiest to share the complete background to explain where we are at:
- For a long time, Safari had a completely different extension system compared with Chrome, Edge, Firefox and any other browsers. Since the Paperpile web app depends quite a bit on the browser extension (beyond just the “import” button…) it was not really possible to rewrite everything just for Safari.
- Luckily, Apple realized that’s a limiting factor for Safari and consolidated their extension system with all other browsers. That allowed us now to work on a Safari extension.
- Roughly at the same time, Chrome announced major changes to their extension system (which is called the “Manifest 3” update). That required us to also rewrite the Chrome extension quite considerably. In principle, that’s good because it gave us a clear deadline for a new and better Paperpile (I will announce something soon here on the forum…).
- However, while Chrome remains steadfast to switch to Manifest 3 in January 2023 we (and everyone else seriously developing Chrome extensions) realized it’s far from stable and an unfinished mess. That’s why we are now in the process to make sure everything will work for our customers on Chrome beyond 2023.
- What does this mean for Safari? Pretty much everything we do now for Chrome also applies to Safari. So all the new features, faster performance, … of the Chrome extension will land on Safari eventually. However, we need to release the new Chrome extension first and go through the beta before it makes sense to release Safari. Chrome Manifest 3 has bugs we need to work around, Safari extensions have their own issues and if we add our own bugs things would get out of hand very quickly…
Beta testing of the new Paperpile will start in early October. It depends on how well this goes to decide when we can move forward with the Safari version. I’ve also added some comments about the new Paperpile in this thread.