Is developing extensions for Safari free?

From https://developer.apple.com/support/transition/

Teams in the Safari Developer Program

The development resources available in the Safari Developer Program are now part of the new single Apple Developer Program. Your existing Safari Developer Program membership will remain active until July 8, 2015 and your Safari extensions will continue to work for existing users. Your extensions will also remain available for download on the existing Safari Extensions Gallery until the fall.

In early fall, the new Safari Extensions Gallery for OS X El Capitan will go live. This gallery will be the safest and most reliable place for users to download Safari Extensions, as all extensions will be signed and hosted by Apple to ensure that they are safe to install. All updates to your existing extensions, must be submitted to the new gallery.

Why does the Safari page still say that it's free? Probably an oversight.

Because it used to be a separate, free program, but on June 8th all of the Developer programs got restructured.

Apparently we will have to pay for the pleasure of creating free extensions to the Safari browser.

What's in it for me?

I don't know, what is in it for you to develop Safari extensions? I've met enough people who make a living writing open source software that gets given away for free.

As far as I can tell, you can develop all the Safari extensions you want for free. It's 2015, if there's documentation you need, it's probably not locked into some place that only paying Developers can see it, even if that's the only place Apple puts it. But if you want to take advantage of Apple publishing your extensions someplace nice and visible, and getting a small amount of tech support from Apple, then you'll have to pay the nominal yearly fee.

I guess you have never built a Safar Extension or tried to load one from source? You need a developer certificate to load any extension code into Safari, which means people will now be required to pay 99 USD to load some bits of JavaScript into the browser. So no, you can’t “develop all the Safari extensions you want for free.”

I had the same question as I got the email that my safari developer membership was about to expire.

From what I gather, the short answer: was free, is no longer as of July 8th.

Im sure this will help the already lacking library of safari extensions flourish even more.

From here:

"Important: To develop extensions for Safari, you need to sign up for the Apple Developer Program online at http://developer.apple.com. After joining the program, you must obtain a signed certificate in order for your extension to work; the extension will not load until your certificate is installed. To request a certificate, follow the “Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles” link from the Developer Member Center homepage."

This is a joke, there's no way to sell extensions so why the **** should developers have to pay, all that's going to happen as a result of this is people are going to lose some great extensions on Safari and switch to Chrome.

Well I am not too thrilled to pay Apple to provide my free software to the users of the Apple Safari browser.

Apple will provide hosting and get a decent store for extensions, charging me for the same service that Mozilla, Google and Opera provide for free.

I contactedApple Developer Supportwith a proposal that free extensions should be free to develop.

Here is the answer from Apple. No hint that they will change their mind.

Hello Per,

Thank you for contacting Apple Developer Support, my name is Andrej and I am happy to assist.

I understand that you are confused why you need to pay now for the Developer Program. I also understand that you would like to get answers regarding your concern. I am more than happy to help you with that.

Please be informed that since the 8th of June 2015 the Developer Program has been updated. We have now one Apple Developer Program which combined the iOS, Mac and Safari Developer Program. Below I attached you a very useful link regarding the major update.

https:/ let us know should you have any other question. If you prefer you can also call us at 00353 1 2480047 (Mon-Fri, 08:00-17:00 GMT), please refer then to your case number 822629949.

Have a great day!

With Kind Regards,

Andrej
Apple Inc.

Appreciation from the community? Glory?

I just wanted to create a simple browser extension for Safari, one button. And when I found out that I need to pay $99 to develop a freaking button for Safari, for Apple, for FREE, on which I won't make any money... I realized that someone at Apple has to be delusional and does not want Apple to grow or help Safari at all.

Who ever is in charge of this, allow making Safari Extensions a free thing.

The email you got is a default "go away" message.

They definitely shouldn't include Safari Extensions in the Apple Developer Program due to the fee. Developing extensions, and certificates to do so, should be free. Otherwise, we may not see many Safari extensions available, that would be otherwise 😉

That's simply ridiculous, as many here have stated already. Paying $99 a year to develop free Browser Extensions is outrageous - and even worse, it puts Apple far behind to like Google, for who's Google Chrome you can develop extensions without paying Google.

Hope they are going to overthink this strategy! I wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more Safari Extensions gone in the near future because of this.

...and all I wanted is update an extension I built some years ago for our company's internal use 😟

I'm not going to bother with it:

$ rm -rf ~/projects/*.safariextension