Installing Every* Firefox Extension

(jack.cab)

125 points | by RohanAdwankar 3 hours ago

10 comments

  • BoppreH 27 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 2 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.

  • gathered 2 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 43 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...
      • RussianCow 23 minutes 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.
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 2 hours ago
      Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.
  • 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.

  • proactivesvcs 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
  • ryanisnan 2 hours ago
    Dang this is so good. Well done.
  • walrus01 44 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...

  • 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.

  • thegdsks 46 minutes ago
    Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
  • layer8 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 39 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 1 hour 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.