Really? As far as I can tell extensions like Evernote (3.2m users), Pocket (1.5m) and Buffer (250k) are heavily used, well understood, and loved by many average consumers.
You could make the argument that the variety of use cases is limited: all of the above are fairly simple "click a button to save somewhere" apps, and they don't do too much fancy integration beyond laying an iframe with their save dialog onto the page.
Our own academic-focused extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paperpile-extensio...) is a bit more niche, but does some cool stuff: we use the background page to parse metadata from PDFs, content scripts to insert buttons into academic search results (Buffer does something similar for Twitter), and it plugs into Google Docs to provide an extra layer of UI.
But alas, the most useful thing our extension does is similar to Evernote/Pocket/Buffer: save a piece of content (in this case journal articles) for later.
I think the problem with doing cool extension stuff is that it's often really hard to get just right: you need to tread carefully when working on a system that could interfere with your user's most basic browsing experience!
You could make the argument that the variety of use cases is limited: all of the above are fairly simple "click a button to save somewhere" apps, and they don't do too much fancy integration beyond laying an iframe with their save dialog onto the page.
Our own academic-focused extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paperpile-extensio...) is a bit more niche, but does some cool stuff: we use the background page to parse metadata from PDFs, content scripts to insert buttons into academic search results (Buffer does something similar for Twitter), and it plugs into Google Docs to provide an extra layer of UI.
But alas, the most useful thing our extension does is similar to Evernote/Pocket/Buffer: save a piece of content (in this case journal articles) for later.
I think the problem with doing cool extension stuff is that it's often really hard to get just right: you need to tread carefully when working on a system that could interfere with your user's most basic browsing experience!