Safari Extensions Gallery
» see safari-extensions.apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
Safari 5 arrived in June 2010 with extension support switched off, so developers could start building against it. Safari 5.0.1 landed on 28 July and turned it on, and the same day Apple opened the Safari Extensions Gallery at safari-extensions.apple.com. About a hundred extensions were in it on day one, picked by Apple out of roughly three hundred already circulating, with Amazon, eBay, Bing, the New York Times and Twitter among the names on the shelf.
The deal was simple and for its era fairly generous. An extension was web code in a signed .safariextz bundle, free to list and free to install, and you could also host one on your own site and have Safari install it directly without going anywhere near Apple. The Gallery was a curated front door rather than a gate. For nine years it was where Mac users went for an ad blocker or a URL shortener, and it was the only such place with Apple's name on it.
Safari extensions were Mac-only at the hardware layer, and that is a wall before it is a preference. The machines I and everyone around me specced out on donanimhaber were Windows boxes assembled from parts, and the browser argument on them was Firefox against whatever Internet Explorer version was current. A Mac in Turkey in 2010 cost roughly what a Mac in Turkey costs now relative to a salary, so the extension shelf attached to one stayed a thing I read about.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | 28 July 2010, shipped with Safari 5.0.1 |
|---|---|
| Peak | about 100 curated extensions at launch, including Amazon and the New York Times |
| Killed | 20 October 2019, first archived capture of the redirect |
| Lifespan | 9 years |
| Made by | Apple |
| Killed by | Safari App Extensions and the move to the Mac App Store |
~ what was in there ~
The category list on the last working capture reads like a tour of what people wanted from a browser before browsers did it themselves: Productivity, Social Networking, Security, Entertainment, Bookmarking, Search Tools, Developer, Shopping, News, Translation, Photos, URL Shorteners, RSS Tools, Other.
Translation and URL shortening were both absorbed into browsers themselves within a few years of that list being written. RSS went the other way and was removed from Safari entirely, which this site has already buried once.
~ the four day gap ~
Apple started winding this down well before it announced anything publicly. From 1 January 2019 the Gallery stopped accepting new submissions. In August 2019 developers got an email from Apple Developer Relations saying the Safari Extensions Gallery would no longer be available in September 2019, and Michael Tsai posted it on 29 August under the headline Goodbye, Safari Extensions Gallery. Safari 13 shipped that September and dropped .safariextz support entirely, so legacy extensions stopped working at once on Catalina and on the two macOS versions behind it.
September came and went and the Gallery stayed up. The Wayback Machine was crawling safari-extensions.apple.com close to daily through that whole autumn, and the root kept returning a 200 with the full category list and working install buttons through 16 October 2019. Then the daily crawl stops. The next capture, on 20 October 2019 at 22:17 UTC, is a 301 into apps.apple.com, an editorial story page in the Mac App Store. The actual switch happened somewhere in those four days.
~ what remains ~
Safari App Extensions replaced the old format and they ship inside a Mac app, which means a developer who wants to give away a toolbar button now needs a whole app bundle and an App Store review to go with it. A great many small extensions did not survive that transition, and the ones that did mostly arrived with a price attached. Lolli's developer posted at the time that the gallery had gone and their extension would simply be unavailable for new installs until they could rebuild it as a native app.
Firefox did the same thing to its own add-on ecosystem a year earlier and took worse publicity for it. Apple got away with it because the Safari extension scene was smaller to begin with, and because the shutdown was announced to developers in an email rather than to users on a page. There was never a farewell notice on safari-extensions.apple.com. The address just started pointing somewhere else one Sunday night.
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