"they're near impossible to monetize "... I would not say so. => Our UI (test) automation/RPA software consists of a totally free open-source extension for web automation plus a paid cross-platform binary file that adds additional desktop automation features. It communicates with the extension itself via native messaging.
The add-on module is available in a limited free and paid fully featured version. It is the classical freemium model, which works well for both, the extension creators and the users.
Very nice idea. As an ISV with a freemium open-source extension, I would happily pay for an official security review that I could present to our users. Our extension is secure by design but having a 3rd-party expert (e. g. Google or Firefox reviewer) confirm this and get a "Reviewed" badge would be great. The drawback is that this could slow down extension updates, as you do not want to loose this badge with the next update. But that is manageable.
Our initial tests were with standard template matching algorithms. With the Javavscript implementation we were stuck in the 60 seconds+ range per image search.
With WebGL it was ~0.5s on a "good" machine and ~6s or "did not work at all" on a "bad" machine. We never figured out why it worked well on one machine, but not so on others. Of course, I am talking only about machines with WebGL enabled ;) This would have been a support nightmare.
With WebAssembly we are now in the 0.1-0.5s range per image search and it just works. So far, we have had exactly 0 WA-related support issues, for both, Chrome and Firefox.
Just to mention a real life use case: We are using WebAssembly for the image recognition features in our Visual UI Testing browser extension "Kantu". Before switching to WA, we tested many other approaches, including WebGL (old demo here: https://a9t9.com/demo/templatematching.js/ ).
Whatever we tried before, it was either too slow (pure Javascript), too unreliable (WebGL) or required 3rd party installations (C++). Finally, switching to WebAssembly solved all these problems.
I am not the op, but (faster) WebAssembly could turn out to be a big thing for browser extensions. For example, we are just in the process of adding WebAssembly powered image search to our Kantu Selenium IDE to allow for visual testing. We tried before with normal Javascript and even WebGL, but both results were not usable for various reasons. The websight page gave us new hope ;-) https://websightjs.com/
Agree - startup alley is not the place to meet (non startup) customers.
I have been to Startup Alley once with my previous company. We managed to get exactly 0 new customers out of it. So on this point, totally agree with you. I did not expect tons of new business, but not getting a single new customer was disappointing, especially since the product sold well otherwise.
However, I got a surprising amount of good discussions out of it, both at the booth and over lunch. And I had fun. So overall, it was worth the price if you factor in the inspirational component.
Another Jekyll advantage: Jekyll it makes it easy to host a blog under your main domain.com/blog, without the need to use a subdomain, without the need to fiddle with Wordpress and without the need to switch your whole website to a (new) CMS. This is a huge timesaver (We use it at https://a9t9.com/blog and a very happy with it.)
3 months seems long. We ported our Copyfish extension to Firefox recently, and the approval process took only ~10 days. I think first feedback took about a week. The reviewer replied with constructive feedback and we had to change a few small things. Then it took another 1-2 days for the final approval. So yes, there is a real human being behind it. Or some super-AI ;)
Extension can/could read all data that you enter in websites. So you should only install extensions from trusted sources/developers.
And/or: What I do is to have one Chrome profile for important websites (e. g. online banking) and another one for the casual web surfing. This "casual" profile is where I try out all new extensions. And only the ones I really need are used in the "secure" profile as well.
In Chrome, you first navigate to the page that you want to automate/test, and then start record.
For use with the Firefox Selenium IDE, use the "HTML" export (not JSON). Then, in the Firefox IDE, you can import these macros simply via the "Open" menu.
There is simply no good OCR engine available that can run inside a Chrome or Firefox extension. The best available is Tesseract.js. And while this engine is fantastic as a project, its recognition rate does not come close to what is available server side.
Actually, based on my tests, there are only a few good services:
Abbyy (best recognition rate but by far most expensive), Google Cloud Vision (second best recognition rate), Microsoft OCR and... our OCR.space service with a very generous free tier and a competitive priced PRO tier.
Well, at least this confirms that the screenshots are not manipulated ;)
The tricky part for the OCR in this example is the diverse background, as the Chinese characters are directly inside the movie.
Your comment is interesting, as the original motivation for creating the Copyfish extension was to help me watch Chinese movies. So I can confirm that for this purpose, it works fine. Of course, once in a while it gets some characters wrong but it works ok with many movies.
Here is a screencast of Copyfish doing subtitle OCR:
Author here. Yeah, Sikuli was one of the role models for Kantu. The way I see it is that Kantu combines the usability of iMacros (which I created years ago) with the no-compromise computer-vision approach of Sikuli. The key difference between Sikuli and Kantu is that the later works inside the web browser. So unlike Sikuli, you can run many instances of Kantu at once and in the background. Kantu does not take over your desktop.... and you don't have to learn Python ;)
"Freemium is a harder model to implement in open source, since the source is, well, open, but we do see this in things like WordPress...."
=> Just to add another flavor: The Freemium model is working well for us even so we are not SaaS.
In our case, the main part of the RPA software is open-source (GPL) and free. All Internet access is only done within the open-source core.
The features of this core app can be extended by local native apps for Mac, Linux and Windows. These are proprietary/closed source.