One of the most anticipated Chrome extensions, was an offering from AdaptiveBlue for the popular application Glue. Glue has long been popular in Firefox. The extension has arrived, but how is it doing?
Now around a day into its release, the Glue extension has found a few high-powered fans, including Sam Sethi and Fred Wilson. But if you view the extensions page, it has accrued a mere 1,200 installs.
Compare this to other top apps in the Chrome extensions gallery, with dozens of applications with over 5,000 installs. In fact, the Glue extension for Chrome is currently the 124th most popular Chrome extension.
What is going on? In my testing, the Chrome Glue plugin has been working great, without even one bug. Have we all merely over-estimated how popular Glue has become? Or, is there something else going on?
Drop your theory in the comments.
Is it not obvious? It’s only been available for a day – others have been around longer.
And by the way, Chrome is far from ‘mass market’ – you have to have the beta channel version to install extensions, and you have to know what a web browser is to even think about installing Chrome…
Also, it’s ultimately a third party service and not something that particularly improves Chrome at the core, such as Flash Block, AdBlock+ or TabSearch etc.
Fair points Dave, but it doesn’t seem to get us all the way there.
Other apps have been around longer, but even among apps that have just launched, it is getting killed.
Also, sure, I am not expecting it to beat adblock, but to have such a small number of total downloads can’t be explained away by comparison alone.
Hey Alex,
I think Glue is doing well on Chrome, did you see this list: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/featured ?
Its ahead of many other extensions here that are recent.
It is just 1 day old too and bear in mind that it will take time for Chrome users to get to play with all extensions.
The top and bottom of this is pretty simple i reckon,…Delicious.
I know there are better services around now (Diigo for one!) but few people use them. Even Google bookmarks hasn’t made much of a dent in Delicious’ market share. I’ve switched to Diigo, Glue and a bunch of others and then after a couple of weeks switched straight back. It’s such a simple task (creating a bookmark) that i think it’s difficult to come up with the next big thing in this area.
I installed Glue on Chrome and the next time I launched Chrome I uninstalled it.
Why? Glue had decided the first thing I needed to do before whatever I was planning to do was go to their website and fill out some form. And so instead of my home page I found myself (without asking, being asked, or doing anything) hijacked there.
A pet peeve of Firefox makes its way to Chrome.
Why do developers do this? It’s presumptuous, abuses the power I guess we give them when signing up, and TURNS ME, ANYWAY, OFF (as I then do to their extension)
Richard,
We appreciate your feedback.
Glue requires an account in order for it to work, it is a challenge with all such extensions, so we are letting you make this choice upfront and if its not for you – you can uninstall.
Alex
That was fast (I didn’t even know you were there.)
I get the dilemma, but there has to be a less invasive way of prompting users. In my experience, an extension that does this once will also do it every time they want to let me know about all the exciting new features in their latest incremental update, for instance.
This is a challenge indeed.
The reason we are doing it upfront is because it is part of your flow. You just installed Glue and now its asking to create account.
If we were to not do that but prompted later, it would be even more weird.
I hope you give Glue another try, and also FYI, you can just use GetGlue.com without the extension.
Alex