Is developing extensions for Safari free?

Hello,


I wanted to start developing extensions for Safari, so I went to Safari Dev Center, clicked "Join Now Free" and it redirects me to the page where I need to purchase apple developer's certificate, which costs $99 - it's not free. So why did it say free, if I need to pay $99? Thanks.

Accepted Reply

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.

Replies

To clarify things a bit for me: it's not only impossible to publish my extension in Apple's gallery without paying $99, but it's also impossible to develop an extension (or change another extension) for my sole use for free? Am I right?

This sounds like typical Apple behavior. They are not interested in making and supporting interesting software, just about making money and locking down their app store / Safari extension gallery. This is why I made the decision a few years ago to stop making iOS apps and just do web development instead. I would try not to waste any effort dealing with Apple, it's nothing but frustration. The best option is to distance yourself from their malicious software whenever possible.

You can develop a brand new extension or improve on an existing one with Extension Builder which is distributed as part of Safari. The problem is that you can't build an ***.safariextz that Safari can load. So you will need to use Extension Builder to load even your own extensions. And that is clunky as you will have to load them every time you restart Safari, typing your administrator password every time.

This is exactly where I am at now. So idiotic.

ME TOO here

Greedy, greedy bastards. It is one thing to develop a free extension for the community, donating your time and effort to help other people. But pay $99 each year to Apple on top of this? Greedy, greedy bastards.

It's the only thing stopping me from using safari. What I want is building a extesion for myself, and don't want to publish. But the policy says, You need to pay $99 a year to use a extension written by myself, how ridiculous!

Since a single account allows to publish upto 500 apps, I was wondering if there is an org which does acts as middleman ie they have a organisation developer account and they allow individual developers to share it via their account?