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Installing Every* Firefox Extension

109 points by RohanAdwankar 4 hours ago | 19 comments

BoppreH 4 minutes 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.

xnorswap 3 hours 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.

username135 2 hours 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.

gathered 3 hours 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?

stratos123 2 hours ago

My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.

walrus01 19 minutes 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...

Eddy_Viscosity2 2 hours ago

Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.

SeanAnderson 2 hours ago

https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#attempts-4-10-...

rented_mule 2 hours ago

It's inline. Search the page for (and heed): epilepsy warning

proactivesvcs 2 hours 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 45 minutes ago

The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/

walrus01 20 minutes 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%2Fz...

https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...

ryanisnan 3 hours ago

Dang this is so good. Well done.

thegdsks 22 minutes ago

Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing

lapcat 2 hours 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.

layer8 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

shakna 15 minutes 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.

HPsquared 53 minutes 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.