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I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon but, except for officially supported developer plugins, I just don't get the need or desire for all this browser extensi

I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon but, except for officially supported developer plugins, I just don't get the need or desire for all this browser extension bling. (though I guess I might have downloaded an SSH extension for the browser in my chromebook at some point) I suspect it's an extension of my embrace of the Unix philosophy (simple tools) to GUI programs. Anyway, I'm certainly happy these bad actors were exposed.

nine_k 6y ago
But extensions do follow the Unix philosophy, if you look at them at a certain angle! - The browser does one thing it does well, which is showing (running?) web pages. - A typical extension does one thing (like annotating screenshots, or filtering trackers, or applying custom CSS), and does it hopefully well. - You collect the extensions you want, and safely ignore the others; they compose without a hitch. I run Firefox, and I run the following extensions, each doing its own narrow and separate thing: - A password manager extension to fill in credentials. - uMatrix for filtering out unneeded parts of Web pages (more for speed than for privacy). - Stylus for custom CSS on certain sites. - Foxy Gestures for mouse gestures. - Markdown Here to render Markdown pieces of input controls to HTML (works great with Gmail or Jira). Thank goodness I don't need to depend on whatever features the browser maker had time to provide to address similar needs, if any. I wish the browser was even more like Emacs, where you have a barebones editor (or browser) and most of the UX around is provided by extensions. I see how it's a much more complex task in the browser environment due to security considerations, though.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I also use - Decentraleyes -- Local cache and forced used of common CDN scripts.