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Life's complexity constantly increases, but our available time is fixed... we need a community-run automated-- and user-reported addon analysis and checking ser
by BugWatch 5y ago
Life's complexity constantly increases, but our available time is fixed... we need a community-run automated-- and user-reported addon analysis and checking service, provided though another addon, which notifies you when one of your installed (or currently page open) addons "goes to the darkside"... sigh
- hydroxideOH- 5y agoThat is actually not a bad idea... but it does go to show the utter failure of Google's extension store that a community-run system would be necessary to police their platform.
- nefitty 5y agoThe alternatives are either fully open repositories (although a slightly motivated programmer can easily view the source of any extension) or a walled garden a la Apple app stores. Am I missing something here?
- hydroxideOH- 5y agoI think the silent, automatic updates and wide-reaching permissions that aren't communicated in an understandable way to end users are the real issues.
- amelius 5y agoA good sandbox with suitable access control would help too.
- hexa22 5y agoExtensions have sandboxing and permissions but to be able to do anything moderately useful you need access to literally everything. For something as basic as an ad blocker or a theme loader you need full access to every page.
- swiley 5y agoThis is not much of an issue on Linux distros where everything is done in the open.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoAll of the "recommended" addons for Firefox (and maybe the most popular ones too?) are regularly reviewed by Mozilla for malicious code. I haven't heard of any problems with those ( probably because most problems are caught before they get pushed to users)