Thursday, July 31, 2014

Name & Shame: SmoothScroll Chrome extension

Homepage Screenshot
Today's "Name & Shame" post goes to SmoothScroll, which was a fairly popular extension for Chrome that added in smooth scrolling, comparable to the iPhone according to their home page.

The reason why I wrote a name & shame post on this extension is because of what it has done to its users. Once a very awesome and useful extension, SmoothScroll has fallen to intrusive adware to earn money. And, according to some user reviews, this adware can even bypass some popular ad-blocking extensions such as AdBlock for Chrome, and AdBlock Plus.

In general, news of extensions falling to shady practices such as injecting adware into user's experiences is not uncommon. However, since I myself was a personal user of this extension, this is why it has affected me directly. I'm really just suck of sellouts in general, both on the internet and in real life.

I recommend that everyone who still uses this extension to go ahead and uninstall it. There's alternatives available, and I'd take "rough" scrolling any day compared to having overly-intrusive ads shoved in my face.

If I was the extension owner, I'd either remove the adware and start fresh, or just delete the extension from the Chrome store. The extension's reputation is already tainted by numerou 1-star reviews.