Useful as many of these utilities may be, I'm worried about the fact that I have to fully trust each and every one of them. There are 63 entries on that list. H

Useful as many of these utilities may be, I'm worried about the fact that I have to fully trust each and every one of them. There are 63 entries on that list. How am I ever going to be sure that _all_ of them are safe? This concern is starting to really affect my use of software more generally. I have found many useful browser extensions but I rarely install any of them because of what they have access to. Open source or not doesn't make a whole lot of difference either, because I'm never going to be able to review and compile all of it myself after every single update. The somewhat surprising consequence is that the built-in features of operating systems and browsers have become much more important to me than they have ever been. Essentially, the software I use is (a) Built into the OS or browser (b) Coming from one of a handful of organisations I trust (c) Purely Web based This is on the desktop. And on mobile the "solution" is to severely restrict what software can do and give disproportionate power to some gatekeeper who will then predictably abuse that position by extracting a 30% cut from everybody and impose content restrictions way beyond what can be justified by computer security.