Channel Bridge for FireFox?

Status: Declined 2 Votes
Scott J
Jul 9, 2019 12:55 PM
Joined Mar, 2019 194 posts

Would you guys consider making a Channel Bridge Add-on for Firefox? The only reason I use Chrome these days is to use the Channel Bridge. If you haven’t used FF lately, it’s made massive improvements and is now sleeker and faster than Chrome, and has a lot of privacy protection components built in, unlike Chrome, which is basically a surveillance arm of Google.

Speaking of Google, instead of Google Analytics, which gives your website's data for free to Google, I would prefer to use Matomo, which is open source and far more advanced than GA and follows the strictest privacy guidelines. Would you also consider giving us the option of using Matomo, which is free when used on one's own website server rather than theirs?

JTVRs
Jul 9, 2019 5:10 PM
Joined Jun, 2018 385 posts

Will a channel Bridge even be necessary once you finalized integration with the other major listing site in Airbnb?

Chris Hynes
Jul 9, 2019 8:38 PM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1401 posts

@Scott, we've considered channel bridge in Firefox and done some investigation on the workability of support. It is possible, as they have a similar extension structure, but we'd have to rewrite a good portion of the underlying code because it's not an exact drop-in. I use Firefox regularly as well and would like to support it, but it's a dev time and support trade-off between marketshare and extra time investment. If they do add the missing support for the extension features we need, so we don't have to rewrite things a different way, we'll probably do it at that point.

If you want to use Matomo, you would put their javascript tracking snippet in the Head HTML box on the site and it'll start tracking.

@JTVRs, ideally channel bridge won't be necessary after we have API integration with Airbnb, but there are still cases you want it to get certain data or in the case of HomeAway if they have a 5 property minimum for integration. Airbnb and booking.com have no minimum, but until HA and TA go to no minimum there'll still be a need for channel bridge for the smaller folks that don't have 5 properties.