18 ms·

Installing every* Firefox extension

692 points by RohanAdwankar 5mo ago

fulNamSexBoomer 5mo ago
This obviously showcases that Firefox needs to work on their support for having all browser extensions at once. Users want and need this.
- Avamander 5mo ago
  I would suspect that some of the slowdown that the author encountered does occur with even a dozen or so add-ons. Why else would Firefox bother you about resetting your profile if you haven't returned in a while?
gathered 5mo ago
I'm laughing so hard at the video, I imagine this is what browsing the web is like for the elderly that barely know how to use a computer. Can someone do this in Chrome?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5mo ago
  Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.
  - rented_mule 5mo ago
    It's inline. Search the page for (and heed): epilepsy warning
    - xg15 5mo ago
      Also enable sound. I think that video might even be better to listen to than to watch it...
  - SeanAnderson 5mo ago
    https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#attempts-4-10-1000-6000 https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#attempts-4-10-...
- stratos123 5mo ago
  My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
  - Evidlo 5mo ago
    Maybe it was this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-pipe/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-...
    - nullify88 5mo ago
      This will make a good office prank for those that leave their desktops unlocked and unattended.
    - robotnikman 5mo ago
      This gives me an idea for an extension similar to this mod but for Firefox, for those who are insane enough to try it: 1/10000 Chance for Withered Foxy Jumpscare Every Second https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3481943642 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=34819...
  - lucasmullens 5mo ago
    For some reason that metal pipe sound was a meme a few years ago, a picture of a pipe and that sound has 5 million views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM
- walrus01 5mo ago
  If you turn loose a completely untrained person to click yes/accept/download/OK/I agree on every type of user interface popup, particularly a person who has no ability to distinguish between a user interface question presented by the operating system itself and something inside of a browser window, that's what you'll get...
  - RussianCow 5mo ago
    I have a vivid memory of once looking over someone's shoulder in the IE days and being horrified to see toolbars taking up about 80% of the available screen real estate, leaving only maybe 150-200 pixels of vertical space for actual web browsing. I have no idea how they got anything done, and my guess was they never actually used any of the installed toolbars and just thought that was normal.
    - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
      I have this memory too lol. I was really quite young but it's like a core memory. Similar to when a middle school teacher told me about Firefox and I discovered tabs.
    - walthamstow 5mo ago
      You can see this today on macOS. I see people with this at work all the time. The defaults have quite inflated scaling and the dock at the bottom. The vertical space left for a website after the address bar is hardly anything.
  - girvo 5mo ago
    I’m aware, that’s exactly what my grandfathers (rest in peace grandpa, I miss you) IE window looked and felt like in the early 2010s!
  - Shadowmist 5mo ago
    You can just say AI
  - abustamam 5mo ago
    I was recently doing some maintenance on my mom's iPhone SE and was quite shocked at how many random apps she had installed. Random forums, shopping apps, etc. Bespoke mobile app wrappers for simple web apps may be the new 'toolbar' or 'browser extension'
- amelius 5mo ago
  That will be one hell of a bug report.
- m132 5mo ago
  Loved the brutal realization that came when the seemingly broken Extensions button the author was mashing for solid 30 seconds turned out to be a fake, extension-supplied one. One... of three.
- xg15 5mo ago
  There was also a nice dramatic arc to it, with the browser first (seemingly) behaving normally, then starting with a few scattered theme switches, then going increasingly off the rails as more and more extensions start up. Also the metal pipe.
xnorswap 5mo ago
This article is wonderful crazy. The icing on the cake is the discovery of a potential performance bug in one or more of the about: pages, that's definitely worthy of following up.
ryanisnan 5mo ago
Dang this is so good. Well done.
username135 5mo ago
"I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid." I geel this on a deep personal level.
lapcat 5mo ago
> It turns out there’s only 84 thousand Firefox extensions. On addons.mozilla.org, but you can distribute Firefox extensions without posting on addons.mozilla.org. I do.
- tech234a 5mo ago
  Other examples I recall when looking into this: Zotero browser connector for Firefox, Chrome Remote Desktop for Firefox (I think it adds a few features for connections to remote desktops)
- pndy 5mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that there were much more XUL and XPCOM extensions back then +10 years ago before mozilla pulled out the plug for that platform and moved to WebExtensions
layer8 5mo ago
> I did some research to find why this took so long. 13 years ago, extensions.json used to be extensions.sqlite. Nowadays, extensions.json is serialized and rewritten in full on every write debounced to 20 ms, which works fine for 15 extensions but not 84,194. Occasionally, databases are useful. ;)
- Waterluvian 5mo ago
  This is probably a good example of the opposite. It would be a mistake to design for the fleetingly rare case. If you’re dealing with a handful of extensions, a json file that’s rewritten is fine.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - HPsquared 5mo ago
    In an ideal world, software with 100 million users would be optimised for energy usage. It all adds up. This does pale in comparison to everything else, though.
  - shakna 5mo ago
    But the software already has multiple database systems built in. There's not exactly overhead to use what plumbing is already there, instead of writing to disk.
    - estimator7292 5mo ago
      Easier for a user to edit.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Chaosvex 5mo ago
      Firefox is absolutely abysmal at not corrupting its JSON stores, too. I've had it crash and lose tabs so many times. Perhaps moving back to SQLite wouldn't be a bad idea. I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.
proactivesvcs 5mo ago
"In terms of implementation, the most interesting one is “Іron Wаllеt” (the I, a, and e are Cyrillic). Three seconds after install, it fetches the phishing page’s URL from the first record of a NocoDB spreadsheet and opens it [...] The API key had write access, so I wiped the spreadsheet."
- methodist 5mo ago
  The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
- thephyber 5mo ago
  Did you just admit to a CFAA violation?
  - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
    What do you mean by "you"? Do you know what quotes are?
  - sunaookami 5mo ago
    Won't someone think of the poor phishers!
  - prmoustache 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - thephyber 5mo ago
      It’s a reasonable default when commenting on a US-based site in English to an English comment about an English article. Quit being a useless scold.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 5mo ago
        I hope you don’t expect us to use imperial measurements.
thegdsks 5mo ago
Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
walrus01 5mo ago
In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz7qq51usb7n91.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz... https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/toomanytoolbars2.jpg https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...
BoppreH 5mo ago
Sad that no real pages can load successfully, but I thoroughly enjoyed the writing. > We turned on crash reporting on the way. I haven't burst out laughing like this in a while! You'll probably make for some horror stories to a poor Mozilla team.
- tech234a 5mo ago
  Firefox crash reports are public though unfortunately I was unable to find their crashes: https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/ https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/ EDIT: if they still have the profile they can actually find the crash ID for their crash report: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-crashes-closing-or-quitting#w_get-help-fixing-this-crash https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-cr...
  - RobotToaster 5mo ago
    All those extensions probably crashed the crash reporter
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
- benlimanto 5mo ago
  It's a fun comedy to watch man. haha... how we developer design and how usually user use, is different matter!
youknownothing 5mo ago
Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?
codemog 5mo ago
I love the small few who take the time to do crazy stuff like this. Very entertaining.
tech234a 5mo ago
Alternatively you may be able to list the extensions using the sitemap: https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml Chrome Web Store has something similar: https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap And Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml
ArneVogel 5mo ago
I won the "Middle Finger Emoji Sticker" Award! (https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#the-middle-finger-emoji-sticker-award https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#the-middle-fin...) I quickly wrote up how: https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/ https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/
- thehias 5mo ago
  why dont you use your own extension?
  - ArneVogel 5mo ago
    I used it on my old pc, but I don't buy still that regularly online so I guess I forgot to reinstall it again. Also it is outdated by now as the domain list hasn't updated in two years.
- benlimanto 5mo ago
  At least you put effort into it and break it. Yet Dr.B extension keep balooning and getting crazier day by day! Now as I write this, it has 97 extensions from prior 84 extension Man, how many slop will he keep putting out there.
3abiton 5mo ago
> Dr. B is the king of slop, with 84 extensions published, all of them vibe coded. > How do I know? Most of their extensions has a README.md in them describing their process of getting these through addon review, and mention Grok 3. Also, not a single one of them have icons or screenshots. > Personally, I’m shocked this number is this low. I expected to see some developers with hundreds! This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?
mmsc 5mo ago
The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.
mid-kid 5mo ago
Seeing this article, and how much webextensions manage to mess up the browser, I'm wondering how bad this experiment would've been with the legacy XUL extensions. Maybe they had a point in getting rid of them...
egeozcan 5mo ago
In this blog post: Let's Game It Out[1] meets web browsing. [1]: https://www.letsgameitout.tv/ https://www.letsgameitout.tv/
6510 5mo ago
There use to be lots of "handy" programs and toolbars for windows xp and internet explorer. You know, the kind of things no one in their right mind would install. I think people learned to code and wanted to make something? My theory was that if you are going to make something you will at least try to make something useful. The free extra toolbar, context or menu button will need some selling point. So I did what every senseless person would do and started gathering lots and lots of "handy" programs and "tools". I install them one by one and then I try to use them as if I was entirely serious about it. IMHO the important part of the process is to identify useless things early (and convincingly) and get rid of it. Quite a lot of them looked like someone put some real work into it and they all got to stay. It took quite some effort to learn to use all of them the way intended but to my complete surprise some of them were actually useful. Besides google toolbar the only one I remember by name is slickrun[0]. Out of all addons competing for search this one also launched applications and opened folders by typing the first letters of a configured keyword and had a hot key. One truly fabulous tool was an extra windows toolbar button that folded out a context menu with a full blown web directory with 10 layers of nested sub menus. What made it fabulous was the sheer amount of effort someone (or multiple someones) made in organizing and curating thousands of websites into sub sub sub sub menus. Every time I thought (for laughs) I'd try find something there it not just was there but it lived in a very obvious place, surrounded by related stuff worth checking out. I had 3 different spelling and autocomplete tools competing for the best suggestion. IEspel usually won as they send all text input to the server. Most shocking was that if you shifted your hands one character to the right it guessed flawlessly what you wanted to type even if non of the characters were correct. I loaded one with some popular phrases. One of the text complete tools also competed with several clipboard history laboratories. Without a license one could install limited Microsoft desktop buddies[2] but after installing many trial applications that had them I gathered a big team of different ones that were shared between applications. This is important because some tools offered screen reading that worked really well in any application. Being "serous" about the process I carefully configured everything which naturally resulted in configuring trillian reading irc out loud, each user with a different voice and a different desktop buddy. IRC had transformed into theater. I just let it run all day and repeatedly cried from laughter. I couldn't remember all the names but different voices are hard to forget. The context menu of "every firefox extension" was nowhere near as terrible as mine. Mine had arrows to scroll and it kept going. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayden.com/slickrun/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayde... (the image in the center at the top is the entire ui, one can drag it around and it floats on top of other windows) [2] - https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover
curioussquirrel 5mo ago
Absolutely unhinged and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing!
cachius 5mo ago
Reminds me of the NPM package that depended es on all other NPM packages https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/ https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/
jason1cho 5mo ago
This article is interesting but hard to read in certain places because it contains distracting information. Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.
xg15 5mo ago
The eternal tension between "this service mesh is completely overengineered for our usecase" and "our broker is far to slow for our 84.205 microservices"...
m132 5mo ago
Brings back the memories of using Internet Explorer when every other installer was fighting for toolbar space! Every Internet café had at least 2, with Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and later on, Bing being the main contenders.
xg15 5mo ago
> I did some research to find why this took so long. 13 years ago, extensions.json used to be extensions.sqlite. Nowadays, extensions.json is serialized and rewritten in full on every write debounced to 20 ms, which works fine for 15 extensions but not 84,194. I'm slightly worried how they arrived at that debounce value. Which extensions need to write to extensions.json continuously, several times a second?
- Someone 5mo ago
  I don’t think extensions ever write that file; Firefox writes it whenever its in-memory set of installed extensions is updated. When Firefox finds new extensions, it updates the in-memory set for each of them. In the typical case that series of updates will be small, and the denounce makes it likely the file gets written only once.
Kholin 5mo ago
Firefox should provide an option to disable the auto popup pages after any extension installed.
majkinetor 5mo ago
What is amazing is that Firefox can actually run at all with that many extensions installed.
anthk 5mo ago
GNU Abrowser and Icecat both point to a curated list of FLOSS licensed extensions.
redoh 5mo ago
[flagged]
danlitt 5mo ago
Is the scraping code available? (in order to regenerate the dataset later)
rossdavidh 5mo ago
My favorite line: "I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid." Not at all; all good developers succeed by finding ways to make their past work look unnecessarily complicated.
alberto-m 5mo ago
Really great writing and interesting experiment! I love the small details like the “clueless user”-style crash report in the `about:telemetry` section (“it just crashed out of nowhere”)
butterlesstoast 5mo ago
I got so much joy out of seeing it take 32 gigs of RAM. Bravo.
evolve2k 5mo ago
I’d like to image with a bit more work, the Firefox core dev team funding this into a CI test and chipping aaay at performance both of Firefox and policies around what goes in the store. Better scanners when extensizoms are unplosded would likely suppprt big gains in removing the poorest quality stuff here and addressing what is leaking memory and is over resource hungry.
atlasagentsuite 5mo ago
[dead]

692 points by RohanAdwankar 5mo ago

This obviously showcases that Firefox needs to work on their support for having all browser extensions at once. Users want and need this.

Avamander 5mo ago
I would suspect that some of the slowdown that the author encountered does occur with even a dozen or so add-ons. Why else would Firefox bother you about resetting your profile if you haven't returned in a while?

gathered 5mo ago

I'm laughing so hard at the video, I imagine this is what browsing the web is like for the elderly that barely know how to use a computer. Can someone do this in Chrome?

Eddy_Viscosity2 5mo ago
Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.
- rented_mule 5mo ago
  It's inline. Search the page for (and heed): epilepsy warning
  - xg15 5mo ago
    Also enable sound. I think that video might even be better to listen to than to watch it...
- SeanAnderson 5mo ago
  https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#attempts-4-10-1000-6000 https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#attempts-4-10-...
stratos123 5mo ago
My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
- Evidlo 5mo ago
  Maybe it was this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-pipe/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-...
  - nullify88 5mo ago
    This will make a good office prank for those that leave their desktops unlocked and unattended.
  - robotnikman 5mo ago
    This gives me an idea for an extension similar to this mod but for Firefox, for those who are insane enough to try it: 1/10000 Chance for Withered Foxy Jumpscare Every Second https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3481943642 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=34819...
- lucasmullens 5mo ago
  For some reason that metal pipe sound was a meme a few years ago, a picture of a pipe and that sound has 5 million views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM
walrus01 5mo ago
If you turn loose a completely untrained person to click yes/accept/download/OK/I agree on every type of user interface popup, particularly a person who has no ability to distinguish between a user interface question presented by the operating system itself and something inside of a browser window, that's what you'll get...
- RussianCow 5mo ago
  I have a vivid memory of once looking over someone's shoulder in the IE days and being horrified to see toolbars taking up about 80% of the available screen real estate, leaving only maybe 150-200 pixels of vertical space for actual web browsing. I have no idea how they got anything done, and my guess was they never actually used any of the installed toolbars and just thought that was normal.
  - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
    I have this memory too lol. I was really quite young but it's like a core memory. Similar to when a middle school teacher told me about Firefox and I discovered tabs.
  - walthamstow 5mo ago
    You can see this today on macOS. I see people with this at work all the time. The defaults have quite inflated scaling and the dock at the bottom. The vertical space left for a website after the address bar is hardly anything.
- girvo 5mo ago
  I’m aware, that’s exactly what my grandfathers (rest in peace grandpa, I miss you) IE window looked and felt like in the early 2010s!
- Shadowmist 5mo ago
  You can just say AI
- abustamam 5mo ago
  I was recently doing some maintenance on my mom's iPhone SE and was quite shocked at how many random apps she had installed. Random forums, shopping apps, etc. Bespoke mobile app wrappers for simple web apps may be the new 'toolbar' or 'browser extension'
amelius 5mo ago
That will be one hell of a bug report.
m132 5mo ago
Loved the brutal realization that came when the seemingly broken Extensions button the author was mashing for solid 30 seconds turned out to be a fake, extension-supplied one. One... of three.
xg15 5mo ago
There was also a nice dramatic arc to it, with the browser first (seemingly) behaving normally, then starting with a few scattered theme switches, then going increasingly off the rails as more and more extensions start up. Also the metal pipe.

xnorswap 5mo ago

This article is wonderful crazy. The icing on the cake is the discovery of a potential performance bug in one or more of the about: pages, that's definitely worthy of following up.

ryanisnan 5mo ago

Dang this is so good. Well done.

username135 5mo ago

"I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid." I geel this on a deep personal level.

lapcat 5mo ago

> It turns out there’s only 84 thousand Firefox extensions. On addons.mozilla.org, but you can distribute Firefox extensions without posting on addons.mozilla.org. I do.

tech234a 5mo ago
Other examples I recall when looking into this: Zotero browser connector for Firefox, Chrome Remote Desktop for Firefox (I think it adds a few features for connections to remote desktops)
pndy 5mo ago
I'm pretty sure that there were much more XUL and XPCOM extensions back then +10 years ago before mozilla pulled out the plug for that platform and moved to WebExtensions

layer8 5mo ago

> I did some research to find why this took so long. 13 years ago, extensions.json used to be extensions.sqlite. Nowadays, extensions.json is serialized and rewritten in full on every write debounced to 20 ms, which works fine for 15 extensions but not 84,194. Occasionally, databases are useful. ;)

Waterluvian 5mo ago
This is probably a good example of the opposite. It would be a mistake to design for the fleetingly rare case. If you’re dealing with a handful of extensions, a json file that’s rewritten is fine.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- HPsquared 5mo ago
  In an ideal world, software with 100 million users would be optimised for energy usage. It all adds up. This does pale in comparison to everything else, though.
- shakna 5mo ago
  But the software already has multiple database systems built in. There's not exactly overhead to use what plumbing is already there, instead of writing to disk.
  - estimator7292 5mo ago
    Easier for a user to edit.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Chaosvex 5mo ago
    Firefox is absolutely abysmal at not corrupting its JSON stores, too. I've had it crash and lose tabs so many times. Perhaps moving back to SQLite wouldn't be a bad idea. I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.

proactivesvcs 5mo ago

"In terms of implementation, the most interesting one is “Іron Wаllеt” (the I, a, and e are Cyrillic). Three seconds after install, it fetches the phishing page’s URL from the first record of a NocoDB spreadsheet and opens it [...] The API key had write access, so I wiped the spreadsheet."

methodist 5mo ago
The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
thephyber 5mo ago
Did you just admit to a CFAA violation?
- weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
  What do you mean by "you"? Do you know what quotes are?
- sunaookami 5mo ago
  Won't someone think of the poor phishers!
- prmoustache 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thephyber 5mo ago
    It’s a reasonable default when commenting on a US-based site in English to an English comment about an English article. Quit being a useless scold.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5mo ago
      I hope you don’t expect us to use imperial measurements.

thegdsks 5mo ago

Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing

walrus01 5mo ago

In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz7qq51usb7n91.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz... https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/toomanytoolbars2.jpg https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...

BoppreH 5mo ago

Sad that no real pages can load successfully, but I thoroughly enjoyed the writing. > We turned on crash reporting on the way. I haven't burst out laughing like this in a while! You'll probably make for some horror stories to a poor Mozilla team.

tech234a 5mo ago
Firefox crash reports are public though unfortunately I was unable to find their crashes: https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/ https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/ EDIT: if they still have the profile they can actually find the crash ID for their crash report: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-crashes-closing-or-quitting#w_get-help-fixing-this-crash https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-cr...
- RobotToaster 5mo ago
  All those extensions probably crashed the crash reporter

throwatdem12311 5mo ago

Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.

benlimanto 5mo ago
It's a fun comedy to watch man. haha... how we developer design and how usually user use, is different matter!

youknownothing 5mo ago

Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?

codemog 5mo ago

I love the small few who take the time to do crazy stuff like this. Very entertaining.

tech234a 5mo ago

Alternatively you may be able to list the extensions using the sitemap: https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml Chrome Web Store has something similar: https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap And Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml

ArneVogel 5mo ago

I won the "Middle Finger Emoji Sticker" Award! (https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#the-middle-finger-emoji-sticker-award https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#the-middle-fin...) I quickly wrote up how: https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/ https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/

thehias 5mo ago
why dont you use your own extension?
- ArneVogel 5mo ago
  I used it on my old pc, but I don't buy still that regularly online so I guess I forgot to reinstall it again. Also it is outdated by now as the domain list hasn't updated in two years.
benlimanto 5mo ago
At least you put effort into it and break it. Yet Dr.B extension keep balooning and getting crazier day by day! Now as I write this, it has 97 extensions from prior 84 extension Man, how many slop will he keep putting out there.

3abiton 5mo ago

> Dr. B is the king of slop, with 84 extensions published, all of them vibe coded. > How do I know? Most of their extensions has a README.md in them describing their process of getting these through addon review, and mention Grok 3. Also, not a single one of them have icons or screenshots. > Personally, I’m shocked this number is this low. I expected to see some developers with hundreds! This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?

mmsc 5mo ago

The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.

mid-kid 5mo ago

Seeing this article, and how much webextensions manage to mess up the browser, I'm wondering how bad this experiment would've been with the legacy XUL extensions. Maybe they had a point in getting rid of them...

egeozcan 5mo ago

In this blog post: Let's Game It Out[1] meets web browsing. [1]: https://www.letsgameitout.tv/ https://www.letsgameitout.tv/

6510 5mo ago

There use to be lots of "handy" programs and toolbars for windows xp and internet explorer. You know, the kind of things no one in their right mind would install. I think people learned to code and wanted to make something? My theory was that if you are going to make something you will at least try to make something useful. The free extra toolbar, context or menu button will need some selling point. So I did what every senseless person would do and started gathering lots and lots of "handy" programs and "tools". I install them one by one and then I try to use them as if I was entirely serious about it. IMHO the important part of the process is to identify useless things early (and convincingly) and get rid of it. Quite a lot of them looked like someone put some real work into it and they all got to stay. It took quite some effort to learn to use all of them the way intended but to my complete surprise some of them were actually useful. Besides google toolbar the only one I remember by name is slickrun[0]. Out of all addons competing for search this one also launched applications and opened folders by typing the first letters of a configured keyword and had a hot key. One truly fabulous tool was an extra windows toolbar button that folded out a context menu with a full blown web directory with 10 layers of nested sub menus. What made it fabulous was the sheer amount of effort someone (or multiple someones) made in organizing and curating thousands of websites into sub sub sub sub menus. Every time I thought (for laughs) I'd try find something there it not just was there but it lived in a very obvious place, surrounded by related stuff worth checking out. I had 3 different spelling and autocomplete tools competing for the best suggestion. IEspel usually won as they send all text input to the server. Most shocking was that if you shifted your hands one character to the right it guessed flawlessly what you wanted to type even if non of the characters were correct. I loaded one with some popular phrases. One of the text complete tools also competed with several clipboard history laboratories. Without a license one could install limited Microsoft desktop buddies[2] but after installing many trial applications that had them I gathered a big team of different ones that were shared between applications. This is important because some tools offered screen reading that worked really well in any application. Being "serous" about the process I carefully configured everything which naturally resulted in configuring trillian reading irc out loud, each user with a different voice and a different desktop buddy. IRC had transformed into theater. I just let it run all day and repeatedly cried from laughter. I couldn't remember all the names but different voices are hard to forget. The context menu of "every firefox extension" was nowhere near as terrible as mine. Mine had arrows to scroll and it kept going. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayden.com/slickrun/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayde... (the image in the center at the top is the entire ui, one can drag it around and it floats on top of other windows) [2] - https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover

curioussquirrel 5mo ago

Absolutely unhinged and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing!

cachius 5mo ago

Reminds me of the NPM package that depended es on all other NPM packages https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/ https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/

jason1cho 5mo ago

This article is interesting but hard to read in certain places because it contains distracting information. Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.

xg15 5mo ago

The eternal tension between "this service mesh is completely overengineered for our usecase" and "our broker is far to slow for our 84.205 microservices"...

m132 5mo ago

Brings back the memories of using Internet Explorer when every other installer was fighting for toolbar space! Every Internet café had at least 2, with Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and later on, Bing being the main contenders.

xg15 5mo ago

Someone 5mo ago
I don’t think extensions ever write that file; Firefox writes it whenever its in-memory set of installed extensions is updated. When Firefox finds new extensions, it updates the in-memory set for each of them. In the typical case that series of updates will be small, and the denounce makes it likely the file gets written only once.

Kholin 5mo ago

Firefox should provide an option to disable the auto popup pages after any extension installed.

majkinetor 5mo ago

What is amazing is that Firefox can actually run at all with that many extensions installed.

anthk 5mo ago

GNU Abrowser and Icecat both point to a curated list of FLOSS licensed extensions.

redoh 5mo ago

[flagged]

danlitt 5mo ago

Is the scraping code available? (in order to regenerate the dataset later)

rossdavidh 5mo ago

My favorite line: "I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid." Not at all; all good developers succeed by finding ways to make their past work look unnecessarily complicated.

alberto-m 5mo ago

Really great writing and interesting experiment! I love the small details like the “clueless user”-style crash report in the `about:telemetry` section (“it just crashed out of nowhere”)

butterlesstoast 5mo ago

I got so much joy out of seeing it take 32 gigs of RAM. Bravo.

evolve2k 5mo ago

I’d like to image with a bit more work, the Firefox core dev team funding this into a CI test and chipping aaay at performance both of Firefox and policies around what goes in the store. Better scanners when extensizoms are unplosded would likely suppprt big gains in removing the poorest quality stuff here and addressing what is leaking memory and is over resource hungry.

atlasagentsuite 5mo ago

[dead]