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Worse still, the design of the most popular extension API is intrinsically poor at protecting users from malicious extension developers (or extension resale to
by kevingadd 7y ago
Worse still, the design of the most popular extension API is intrinsically poor at protecting users from malicious extension developers (or extension resale to malicious developers). Until Google and Mozilla fix the design people shouldn't be installing more than a handful of extensions, because they end up usually having complete access to all your data for convenience reasons.
- sp332 7y agoExtensions have a similar model to phone apps. They have a basic set of APIs available, and beyond that they have to ask for permission before they can use more. E.g. I have a Firefox addon called "t.co unmangler" that only has permission to access my data for twitter.com and can't read anything else. If an extension is compromised and tries to access more that it was allowed before, the browser will block it until I grant permissions.
- kevingadd 7y agoThe problem is the granularity of the permissions is extremely coarse, so if you scan the top extensions on the chrome web store a vast number of them request access to All Pages, HTTP and HTTPS included. This is because various useful primitives require that access. Another problem is that requesting a new permission in an extension update has extremely bad UX, to the point that any thoughtful extension developer will just ask for everything they could possibly need up front. If you request a new permission Chrome just silently shuts off your extension until the user goes digging around in the UI for the permission request. The last time I tried this about 5% of my users figured it out and the rest thought it was broken.