I scraped Chrome Web Store reviews to find abandoned extensions that still have 100k+ users

I've shipped 4 Chrome extensions and 2 VS Code extensions. The advice that always sounds smart — "find a popular extension the dev abandoned, rebuild it better" — is miserable in practice. You open the Web Store, see 100k users and a 4.4 rating, think you found gold, then burn a weekend reading reviews only to realize half the complaints are unfixable traps (sync died, login broke, backend gone).

So I built a small pipeline to do the boring part automatically.

The method

Scrape public Chrome Web Store metadata — users, rating, last-updated date.

Filter: 20k–300k users, 18+ months without an update, rating 3.3–4.4 (good enough to prove demand, bad enough to prove pain).